For a moment he saw her in the train’s yellow window
pounding on the glass
and wanted to love her.

He wanted to ache in her tragedy.
He wanted to mourn her fragility, her beauty
how lost she was.

Only to her, any stranger
was someone to hold in the darkness.

She was a girl who fooled herself.

She regarded the dark through her reflection
and conceived she saw her savior.

This was love she said
and it grew in the womb of her head.

She should have known
she couldn’t choose her angel,
but she was only trying to love herself in her loneliness.

The boy receded
to keep the girl from giving herself away.

He refused to let her love him, to save them both.

He felt dark pain
that he wasn’t enough to be taken,
for everything he was and wasn’t.

He would have loved her if he knew how.
But he was only a boy who didn’t know himself.

Standing back from the tracks
the train soared between them.

It wasn’t stopping in this town.