The Train

The Train is a poem that Gregory's Muse one day sent—quite unexpectedly!—roaring, racing, and rumbling along the mainline of his imagination over 25 years ago. (He was laboring on another poem at the time!) Every two or three years, on receiving train-orders from his Muse, he has been hauling it off the sidetrack he always shunted it onto when the inspirations to work on it dried up and the Muse was ordering him to work on other projects. He'd then spend a few day running it along the mainline of his imagination so he could follow his Muse's demands that he paint and polish it to a limited level of perfection. Of course, each Muse-inspired effort not only added paint and polish to this train, but deepened its complexity, meanings, and power. His Muse has recently intimated that with this most recent of efforts, The Train is now ready to race along the mainlines of other imaginations besides his own.
This poetic allegory depicts our human life as a ride aboard the Train of Fate, which rolls, rumbles, roars, and horn-blasts along the mainline tracks of this desert of an illusion we call time. Our ticket-to-ride on this train is our physical birth and our only way off it, is at that brief flag-stop we call death.
All human beings exist aboard this Train of Fate in two modalities: the dominant, alpha-modality in this modern, rationality-worshipping, ego-glorifying age, obviously being our precious, pandered-to, personal ego. The secondary, usually submissive (almost to the point of non-existence) modality, is our True Self, our Spirit, which incarnates into our infant—"naked-ape"—body and psyche at birth in order to enhance Its own level of consciousness while concomitantly spiritualizing our infant, flesh-bone-and-blood, "naked-ape" body.
This dual-modality reality renders our lives aboard this swift-flying Train of Fate, as a constant struggle, as an unfolding array of crucial and life-defining choices between a debased existence of relentlessly kowtowing to the tyrant of our ego, or a life of humbly serving the needs of our True Self, our Spirit. It is a struggle between an existence that is small, dark, hard, mean and self-serving, or a life that is expansive, bright, compassionate and Spirit-serving.