Failure of the Day: Me, Again

Where I went wrong, probably, was in trying to write a love poem about the trains. It’s clear from the winners that what they were really after was a love poem more or less near the trains.

And I don’t suppose it helped that my poem was pretty sexual in its about-a-train-ness. Or that I thought it would be fun to write the world’s only train sex poem that didn’t use any phallic imagery at all. No, I don’t guess any of those things helped.

Here’s my poem:

Waiting

It’s coming:
The press of air that raises my flesh,
That rushing throat,
The sound that swallows all sound.

It comes in the shudder that passes
From the wet ground to my ready
Skin, pressed hard against the pavement,
Strong enough to worry my balance

Big enough to fill its roiling path
With the culmination of its presence;
I am held in the mouth of that power
Hastening, trying to catch it.

I press the penny of my heart to the rail
And wait.

And OK, it’s bit stunted (there was a 100-word limit) and it slips into sentimentalism, to say nothing of a strange fastness/slowness thing at the end, but overall, it’s an OK poem I thought. But then again, I also thought there couldn’t possibly be more than a dozen entries—who reads the Caltrain Web site anyway?—and there were over 300, mostly, I understand, from schoolchildren. Which I don’t guess helped my poem seem any less like a sex-with-a-train poem. Oh well. No free dinner on a boat for us.

Anyway, the winners.