Angelous Novus

Oh, metal behemoth

carving your way

down broken tracks

through the underbelly

of nowhere New Jersey,

What hell are you off too?

 

No- do not tell me.

The stares of each gray face pressing

against your windows say enough.

They look out into the wasteland

where I look back

at one blurred façade

of hollowed eyes,

dry lips,

furrowed brows,

and pale cheeks.

Each an angel.

Each a lamb shipped to the slaughterhouse

Each a near sighted nymph of misery

Each whisked away.

 

The thunder of your engine has

melted to the sound

of an endless ocean

drawing  me closer,

lacing wind through my hair,

rippling needles through my clothes.

If I were to reach out my arm

It would be stripped away

By your wall of infinite momentum.

My eyelids wilt.

One more step and I’d feel

nothing ever again.

I want nothing more

than to succumb to your beauty,

and as I move my foot out,

ready to enter the bliss,

your last car speeds by,

and the resonance of your roar

begins fading to a moan

 

and I am left here

forgotten.

 

Abandoned factories

surround the train line.

They loom like colossi,

planted into the ground.

 

Once emblems of commerce,

now the decomposing

tombs of industry.

Vacant,

bearded with vines,

adorned with broken glass,

they look down at the tracks

and sigh.

 

I wander their lonely halls

to observe the end of days:

A purgatory

where the remnants of our society

are in the process of being

reclaimed by the earth.

 

I see now

that humanities’ epilogue

shall be a short poem,

of dead angels

littering the ground,

bathed in moss.