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Image for the poem train from midnight

train from midnight


‘if your gonna treat me like a whore,
you better have what it takes to satisfy a whore.’

she looked me in the eye & told me that straight out,
made me think twice about crawling into an affair with her.
made me re-examine my qualifications.

the night I found her in a seedy bar, I could see the lonely written
on her like a fancy tattoo. that’s what gets me every time, more
than the suspicion in her eyes or the sway in her foxtrot.
I sell out for loneliness.

we stayed close after that. coffee & pie in a café where the only
music was the moody whistle of the midnight train that we were
never on. she’d spend the night at my place if it was too late to
driver her home.

the whole episode coulda been shot in black&white with the right
characters. but Bogart never worked on a case, or a pint of bourbon,
with Gene Tierney.

once I told her it might’ve been different for her if she waited for
some other man that night.; fancy dinners & nightclubs. ‘I wasn’t
waiting for a man,’ she said. ‘I was waiting for you.’ maybe I shoulda
been insulted, but I suppose, inside me, I knew what she meant.

if I ever had a ticket on that midnight train, I sold it for her heart. she
showed me her unique perspective on love, & on sex. things I wouldn’t
have figured out on my own. & she taught me some things: how a
woman doesn’t have to paint herself pretty if everyone figures she’s
a whore anyway.

how a man can be a whore, too…


(Art: Xan Stark)

Written by JohnFeddeler
Published
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