Chair Car

Chair Car
---- Big Frank Dickinson

These people look like they're part of
The car, all green - green carpet,
green walls, and very green chairs.
All silently alive with darkness,

Black, the secondary color; and
White accents interposed by the cloth
At the back of the chair, which
Shrieks heads and thoughts unknown.

These are people on a train in
A chair car, full of just that
Plus people whom the chairs
Swallow up, it is a chair car.

It is not a people car.
The woman in the foreground
Dressed so absolutely green that
She melts into her chair

Is reading with a scowl matched
By the squinting eyes of the woman
In red who's glancing backwards,
At nobody but her own thoughts.

The two in the front are only
Heads sprouting muted questions
That fill this car as fully as the
Green which assails you as it

Absorbs them into the hushed
Isolated, normal, quiet hum
Of interior monologue as vegetative
As the sense of beechwood sap.