Crouched between boxcars, fingers raw and split,
face creased like worn leather from weather and want.
His pocket holds nothing but a dented tin of beans
and a harmonica, tarnished green with spit and time.
The train lurches, metal on metal, screaming steel.
He doesn't flinch anymore. His body knows the rhythm,
the violent shake that rattles loose teeth and memories
of when someone, somewhere, might've called him son.
Daybreak finds him hunched over the beans,
cold and uncooked, scraped with dirty fingers.
No fire here, between towns where smoke means
unwanted attention, means clubs and dogs and running.
Night brings the mouth organ to cracked lips.
The notes quiver out, uneven as his breath,
a broken melody carried away by wind and darkness,
swallowed by the vastness of empty plains.
His eyes, two faded marbles, have seen a thousand miles
of America's backbone—rust-belt towns, grain silos,
abandoned factories where prosperity died quiet deaths.
The country's failures written in every closed storefront.
Under bridges, behind warehouses, in hobo jungles
where men like him gather, sharing nothing but
the communal understanding of having fallen through,
of existing in spaces others pretend not to see.
The harmonica wheezes a tune from another life.
Three minutes of beauty from lungs full of coal dust.
The tin scrapes empty. Tomorrow, another yard,
another train, another day of staying invisible.
This is freedom, he tells himself between shivers.
This is what it means to live untethered, unowned.
The lie tastes metallic, like the beans, like the tracks,
like the blood in his mouth when rail bulls find him.
Still, when the whistle blows and the cars jerk forward,
when the landscape blurs and the wind cuts clean,
there's something holy in this pain, this hunger.
Something true in owning nothing but breath and distance.
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