trestling
by Karl Koweski © 2008
I don't know when it began or who it began with
the act itself leaves little in the way of physical
evidence a reason, perhaps, why trestling appeals
to the lost and spiritually collapsed – self-loathing
of this scale doesn't call for negation so much as
vaporization – maybe a celebrity brought the
awareness of trestling and its gruesome subculture
to the mainstream, but not a big time celebrity
just a character actor on the wrong end of a few
relationships with fast women, slow horses, brown
bottles, and he takes the long walk, ascending the
bullet train trestle, a sort of pilgrimage of the
damned, all ready dead to the world, jeered and
cheered by the assembled ghouls who wear raincoats
and vampires who wear nothing, below – the suicides,
the actor among them, congregate near the summit
where the sun is at its zenith and lay down on the
tracks like Aztec sacrifices, awaiting the train
that will crush them into a blast of misty viscera
raining down on the ghouls and vampires beneath.