Here Travels the Night

Here travels the night

whispering some vague welcome to me

through the windows of lit village windows.

Of homes with a chair for me

offered up for me.

There must be an old country song

playing softly on the piano in the back of the room,

the tune remembered

the words mostly gone,

train tracks drumming their clacking teeth

and the whirr of the night

nothing but dark white noise.

I am drawn to lists

like moths to garish light,

middle aged men to cans of beer

hookers to their plastic pink lipstick

in the bowels of clutch purses,

like cats to cream

and by the time my similes run dry

so do my eyes run wet

with something deep at the burning core:

red hot ash,

embers,

a volcano.