but still enchanting anyway.

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i like movies with trains. black and white pictures with women in wide-brim hats and traveling suits with cloth-covered buttons, chain smoking and staring out the windows— with the world beyond the glass moving so fast there’s no way it could be faked. i like movies about gamin girls. girls that look like young, wobbly fawns with big eyes and dark brows. girls in maxi dresses, chain smoking, girls with drug problems girls suffering and suffering and suffering in the 60s because there’s too much of nothing to do because being in the void was better than caring about people dying on the other side of the world. i like movies about dreams movies that move between the character world and the world within the character i like movies about space about death i like movies that go under the sea movies with treasure movies with scary old people in scary old houses. i like movies that film a shot from the lid of a coffin sinking into the earth, i like movies that shoot a character through a window of the character looking though the window, i like movies where people are murdered in reflections and the murderer is in a wide-brimmed hat, chain smoking, playing with the flick-lid of a lighter while taking the train out of town.

it is seven twenty six pm and of all times of the day, i think this would be the perfect hour to be on a train, following the sun setting, watching the gold light move across faces, forming flaws into abstractions i would like to take a train to pittsburgh. alone. play poker til 3a and end up in some bar or some bowling alley or some hotel lobby with a big chandelier in pittsburgh. watching the smoke stacks as the sun comes up, sitting on my hotel bed while the bath water runs, chain smoking in the tub and waiting for the coffee to come. i have a cold heart. and i don’t know what to do. day after day all of my romantic ideas are me alone, on a journey alone getting somewhere alone and doing something alone and then maybe encountering a stranger. that stranger is terribly important to this sequence. i have a cold heart and i’m too smart and i have a rotten mouth, i drink like a sailor and i like old stories. i read too much i’ve seen death too much and i’m pretty and terribly mean. the stranger is important because he does not know this yet. the stranger is the story. he’s what the entire story is for.