A Poem Partly about a Time Traveling Train

I keep myself in a toy box. It’s where I work best. Here I can turn things into a violin or a canoe or an airplane or into myself. Here I go, writing about transformation again, but it’s important I impart this wisdom before leaving home. It’s all on you now I tell myself before I run, full speed, out the door and into the woods, never to be seen again. The new me explores their new surroundings. Rides a bike. Makes a model car. I write an opera on an accordion; it’s about taking a long train ride and at the end of the ride I find myself very high up and there’s a soft breeze. I think about the air leaving my lungs and I hurry to cram it all back in. Try as I might, I can’t find the same air. The breeze has taken it and I want to get down. The train has left; it reversed itself down the track and from my vantage I can’t tell if it’s moving backward in space or time. If it’s time, then I must be on the train still, moving back to where I’m from, a place where I can turn things into anything I want. I can turn this ambulance into a forest and this forest into a time traveling train and this time traveling train into myself so that I can finally leave.

In the End, Think of the Broomsticks from Fantasia

My dad had a pair of shoes that were his lawnmowing shoes. They were white before they were his lawnmowing shoes, but then, with all the lawnmowing, they became green and covered in bits of grass. On TV the man parks his car but then climbs out of the hood. As he’s walking away he realizes there were other people in the car, each climbing out of the hood when they think he’s not looking. Isn’t that how it goes? We need a place to hide so we go behind a tree that’s too thin but somehow it works? We could hide a whole car behind this tree. Watch me push this submarine behind this tree and you’ll never see the submarine again. You shouldn’t picnic on a lawn that’s being mowed. You shouldn’t lie down on a lawn to read a book if it’s being mown. The mower could go over the picnic making lots of little picnics. The mower could mow the book creating lots of little stories. A lawnmower ran over me once and now there’s too many of me to count.