Loco Motives

Thomas Quitzau

September 15, 2021

What was once graffiti is now street art. 

Locomotives break their silence sharply 

Thinking they scared us, trying to warn us 

There’s erl in dem där hills waiting to ship...

B E   S O M E O N E

Shiny black pill-shaped cars match their contents.

We played with them empty, clean, perfectly 

Connected rattling thoughts in our oily

Heads we had no idea they’d be filled with...

B E   S O M E O N E

Serving us, serving as black canvases,

Multi-colored loopy repetitive 

Spray paint punctuates a single unit 

Of the run-on sentence proposition:

B E   S O M E O N E 

Now there’s a new president/precedent:

Stop the fracking, stop the drilling, kill jobs.

So the trains don’t run as frequently now.

Oil prices have risen, jobs are frozen…

B E   S O M E O N E?

Now, the iconic Houston overpass

Over which thousands of rail cars clattered

And billions of gallons of crude have passed

Has been painted over and now reads:

K N O W   G O O D.

Thomas Quitzau is a poet and teacher who grew up in the Gulf Coast region and who worked for over 30 years in Houston, Texas. A survivor of Hurricane Harvey, he recently wrote a book entitled Reality Showers, and currently teaches and lives on Long Island, New York with his wife and children.