like a tapioca glob
		-----------------------------------------------------------

		a train is a kind of anaconda
		it is a huge serpent and an even larger sperm
		it brings life to an egg that is its terminus

		a sleeked glob of tapioca pudding (we are the oka)

		a good train is loud elfin laughing
		a witchy smithy clanky chanting as if carlos santana's
		had there ever been invented an axe called
		railroad guitar...

		a trip and a half in a train is trance

		the romance of train trips...
		even the paltry new jersey transit bit
		wisks the landscapes and the towns the pines
		into well-beaten egg whites
		and the asian girls with backpacks on get on
		going to washington square?  brooklyn?

		entrain the fantasy of shagging the shaggy-haired sleepy
		blonde entrained complete with holey jean knees with
		pristinely white knees.  surely not white plains?  katona? 
		christopher street?

		my trains were entirely the too long and too short of it.
		uncomforable miserble i have at times become
		yet i disdain nothing.  i walk away in need of more trains.
		i often think of trains -- as does robyn.

		in schenectady in albany when slinking slowly past platform
		deserted in cleveland lampooned by the curvilinear
		skyline of latenight rochester

		the name of the rain -- lake shore limited --
		has rivuleted -- plink -- inside.  beneath my train window
		it micro-lies.  am flooded.  microcosmically.  a lake
		roared like a river.  like a train.
		like a tapioca glob.


			Marek Lugowski
			14 May 1997
			Chicago, Illinois

			[rev. 20 December 1997]