Midnight express

The station clocks all melted at a quarter after nine I heard the midnight express breathe on a crooked silver line Its windows held a thousand faces, pale as paper skin And every one of them was smiling like they knew where I’d been I stepped aboard with shaking hands and a ticket in my coat The conductor wore a veil of ash, a rusted ring of smoke He punched a hole through silence and he whispered, “Settle in” Then the doors sealed like a secret and the dark began to spin Ride the midnight express, don’t look back Past the lantern ghosts and the broken track If you hear your name, let it fade, let it go Down where the cold black river and the dead lights flow Ride the midnight express, hold your breath Past the wired-up stars and the fields of death There’s no morning here, only glass and steel And the things that wait in the dark are real We crossed a valley made of clocks, all ticking out of time Saw black rain falling upward from a sky of sharpened mine The crows were stitched in fog, perched still on telephone wire bones And pale red houses leaned together, cracking open like old stones A child stood in a window with her eyes of faded chalk She lifted one small finger and she watched the train just balk Then the engine screamed like thunder through a throat full of sand And I felt the whole car shudder like a pulse beneath my hand Ride the midnight express, don’t look back Past the lantern ghosts and the broken track If you hear your name, let it fade, let it go Down where the cold black river and the dead lights flow Ride the midnight express, hold your breath Past the wired-up stars and the fields of death There’s no morning here, only glass and steel And the things that wait in the dark are real In the sleeper car, the mirrors grew a mouth They sang my buried secrets like a wind dragging south I saw my own face aging in the aisle’s pale sheen Then it split into the others that had vanished in between No prayer could wake the lanterns, no scream could break the chain The train kept on remembering every grief I ever named Ride the midnight express, hear it call Through the rotten moon and the endless fall If you reach the end, there’s no home, no dawn Only quiet little footsteps after everyone is gone Ride the midnight express, disappear Let the iron hymn pull you near When the last car fades and the dark stands still You’ll know the road was hungry, and it always will The station clocks all melted, and the night closed in its eyes I was never really leaving, just becoming one more sigh On the midnight express, where the lost ones rest And the landscape eats the living like a slow, patient test.