Ghost Train

Simon MacCulloch

The ghost train wagons rattle round their circuit of illusions

With us aboard, expectant, bound for nightmarish confusions

Of light and dark, direction, space and time, the balanced senses

As past and future lives embrace in love of present tenses.

The goblin faces, green and red, spin fiendishly in orbit

Each neon blood splash swiftly spread, with blackness to absorb it

The ghouls and coffin dwellers claw us, howling to relate

Like grisly fortune tellers, all the horrors of our fate.

A dark reflection looms in view, is quickly gone behind us

A parody of me and you, distorted to remind us

That beauty is, as Shakespeare said, no stronger than a flower

And long before our flesh is dead it twists within death’s power.

What’s that? Another mirror? No - those softly wriggling features

As hellish in the fiery glow as Satan’s impish creatures

Are portraits made of graveyard worms; what painter’s skill in oil

Could help the model come to terms with what awaits in soil?

And where the sculptor in whose hand is such a dread precision

To make the sitter understand the prospect of revision

Of what we are, unless it be the one who moulds the wax

To shape the rotting heads we see impaled beside the tracks?

Thus cradled in our travelling grave we turn the final bend

And daylight comes as if to save us from our journey’s end

The fairground music breaks like foam upon our tomb-deaf ears

Inviting us to stay and roam its world of hidden gears.

Then stay we do, to haunt and drift in search of an objective

And try to understand the shift in all our thoughts’ perspective

That leaves our bodies in the rides that darken sunny coasts

So that in all the world besides we only walk as ghosts.

Simon MacCulloch lives in London and writes poetry for a variety of journals - Spectral Realms, Dreams and Nightmares, Black Petals, Pulsebeat etc.