![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/4efd7163f86933ad5ced77114cc867d0.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Midnight Boxcar Poetry<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n by Fred Voss<\/em><\/p>\n Sometimes I feel I should tell all the men in this building Midnight Boxcar Poetry by Fred Voss Sometimes I feel I should tell all the men in this buildingI write poemsabout themtheir smilestheir hammers their larger-than-life laughs bouncing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":432,"featured_media":16515,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1660],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/432"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
I write poems
about them
their smiles
their hammers their larger-than-life laughs bouncing off
the 70-foot-high factory ceiling like they should be heard
by all the world
but somehow
it would be like putting a beautiful wild Bengal Tiger
in a cage
clipping the wings
of an African Grey parrot skimming the tops
of Brazilian rainforest trees as a rainbow
appears
telling the pool player in Van Gogh\u2019s hellish The Night Caf\u00e9
he will be in a painting
someday worth 10 million dollars
a meteor can\u2019t help streaking across a sky
a cat doesn\u2019t know how
it leaps from a 12th-storey window
and lives
a Joe Louis punch
was born before the first poem
was ever spoken
would you tell Marlon Brando to look into a mirror
right before he yells, \u201cSTELLA!\u201d
in A Streetcar Named Desire
when I walk around my machine gripping this wrench
among all these men real and natural as Niagara Falls
I never read
Shakespeare or Shelley or walked the halls
of UCLA PhD school in English literature
and I look over at the man at the next machine
as a drop of cutting oil drips from his brush
onto the razor-sharp flutes of a 5-pound tool steel cutter in his fist
40 years ago he rode a boxcar
across midnight Arizona sands to get
to this machine shop
when he was 19 and homeless and could barely read a word
but how can I ever tell him
all the poems there ever were or ever will be
shine
inside that drop of golden
cutting oil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"