Stopping in the middle

“Never stop the train between stations,”

the old man told us as we rode going west

dust swirling in every open window

of a train straight out of another time

the raw desert stretching out on both sides

raw and remote, thick with that lonely ache

I sometimes get waking up alone

“This world is full of snakes and pitfalls,”

he went on, his wrinkled face testimony

to all the things he’d seen,

while we stared out at the passing things

bones stripped to white by unrelenting sun

and perhaps the bones of things that

may have resembled us, greenhorns

coming west for some adventure we thought

of as fun, not deadly or painful or worse.

How many have gotten off their train too soon

thinking they could huff and puff through the desert

only to end up bones,

“It doesn’t matter where you’re going,” the old man said,

“as long as you don’t stop half way there.

Don’t get off until your ticket tells you to

and you plant your feet firmly on a platform

not the remains of someone else’s misery,

and we stared out at the scenery, wondering

how many lost souls had chosen to get off too soon,

and whether any of them actually managed to get

to the other side, how many are still out there

waiting forlornly as we pass by.