My Thin Men
I found my dreams in the black book, pressed between the pages where I had put them. They must have lain there carelessly forgotten, moved by a hand other than mine, while I wandered elsewhere, distracted. It was coincidence or chance or perhaps deliberate manipulation that led me to touch them again.
When I flicked the pages I heard the whistle of the freight train still passing through as it had before, beckoning me on board to take my place alongside the other fugitives who travelled there. In my freight train dreams I rocked and huddled with thin men wearing hollow faces and eyes burnt out by a certain hunger. It was not a hunger that food could fill or one that could be satisfied by a fickle sunset or a lovesick moon but more a starving of the spirit. It was a hunger that I followed while they searched for the ingredient that would make them whole. We rode the trains across the rivers and through the living rooms of the corn filled continent. First wheat then cotton, we cut a road through.
I was safe with them. I knew where their journey ended or at least I thought I did, travelling blind into the deep unknown. I slept in their warmth, fuelled by the fire in the hearts as we slid electric through the darkest nights, across vacated plains. My sleeping breath rising in tune with their cowboy harmonicas and my train’s lonely whistle.
They lit cigarettes under lampposts, their stark cheeks haloed, their collars turned up against the wind as they walked hunched, down glistening streets where soulful music shrieked from dark dungeons. I followed, sheltered from the wind by their bodies, as they led me through a subterranean city of restless wanderers who lived in coffee bars and tenements and whose mad dreams lay scattered about floors and floated down from windows, written on tape which was torn and tangled and trod underfoot once the parade had passed. The thin men struggled and continued on.
This time to a bountiful place of ripe tomatoes and grapes seductive to the touch of gaunt and hungry men. There were women too, plump and brightly coloured, singing songs while they picked and plucked to the sun’s warm orchestra. Bread was broken, cheese was shared. Days sped towards night, which gathered speed as it rode the stories of the places the thin men had been. They talked about life above dead flames and softened our hardened hands and calloused hearts with their bitter blood and country wine.
Somewhere in the distance our freight train whistled. Let me gather my cluttered thoughts and my clumsy language and take that ride again.
