Boxcar Poet

By Alan Ford

Riding the rails in a freight train
a steel door slides back.
But love doesn’t.
Just the pendulum of the past
sliding to behind him.

He’s a boxcar poet.
His life is like an unwritten verse,
a truth never told.
Invisible to history
he’s an elegy to a life still lived.

A landscape caked with dirt and dust
rushes past him.
But there is no bridge to link the 
past to the present. 
And the horizon makes no promises.

He’s in a world far away from home
(wherever that is) So how did he get here?
By chance, or by choice.
By luck or by fate.

Does he have memories of another life?
A family photo in his pocket.
A need to forget. A guilty
secret of decaying days?

There are no towns, no borders
no suitcase to trap the past.
But is he really free
or is he a barren
homage to freedom?

Somewhere he is travelling still.