– Distant Cities –
The city is dark and wet;
A maelstrom of rain comes
in steady sheets across the night sky,
as if trying to wash the city
from the skin of the earth itself.
I hear the heartbeat of the urban jungle;
The sounds of traffic bustling in the streets below,
the last train arriving on the northbound platform,
taking their daily ferry of passengers
home from the long days’ work.
Sometimes I pretend that it’s the sound of the train
that ran behind my childhood home.
I would hear it late at night
as I lay lonely in my creaking bed,
tracking through the depths of the forest
with the echo of a distant horn.
It was the only sound of life for miles and miles,
and it helped me to remember
that there were other humans
somewhere out there in the darkness,
awake and alive like me,
dreaming of a distant city
that they might some day call their own.