Silver rails glisten
like snail tracks on cinders
Metroliner dawn

Mist clings to the ground
a comforter for the earth
against morning's cold

Amber morning light
shattered factory windows gleam
like chapel stained glass

Onion domed churches
and sardine-stacked rowhouse streets
slide by silently

“Express” commuter rail
mysteries lurk in the fog
we creep around turns

Bursts of blue skies
lined
with gods-whisker golden clouds
cirrus morning shadow

Dense scrub forests
islands in suburban sprawl

pass, invisible

Morning light turns hard

watercolor mists retreat

unforgiving day

Jersey office parks
Metropark megaliths
among plastic trees

Rahway's flat rooftops
mirror the slate shine from
the
refinery clouds

Newark Airport spews
another pumpkinseed plane

into dawn's visage

Burning rubber smell
acrid as a tire dump fire
Welcome to Newark

It's a winter sun
on an early fall morning

urban grit sky

Bricks, steel and shambles
line the New Jersey railroad
vacant lots steaming

Newsprint-colored sky
brown, black, traffic-cone orange
graffiti relief

Post industrial
landscape reflects in the Kill

ducks, egrets, phone poles

Cargo cranes, gantries
gather in Meadowlands mist
conspiring, waiting

Then down below ground

below the Hudson, into
Manhattan's bowels

Up from the darkness
disgorged into the station
the rush for fresh air

Oh, screw the cab line

I'll walk across Manhattan
I'm travelling light.