the lover, the stranger, the irony

Note: If you feel this should be in a different thread, please suggest.
Also, it may sound better with an audio...I'm not genius of reading poetry, but I just felt like reading it aloud :]
http://mp3space.com/file/8313/the_lover,_the_stranger,_the_irony


It's 1944 and a distorted war
plays violently in the background of
dozens of crowded railroad stations
throughout the States.

Summer's weariest people show up to fight
for the seats of a train forsaken by continuum;
that welcomes the world news
that no decent man wants to hear.

They are like the words of a playwright
who sits at the top of a raggedy staircase
in a cold, bare, ghostly theatre
at the heart of the ghetto.

All the strangers on the left,
All the lovers on the right,

one by one, the passengers are shamed.
As their tickets are punched,
their baggage is taken, they
are shuffled quickly to assigned seats.

And they patiently wait with
expressionless faces pressed to the window;
they are visual reminders
of a past that taught them to

work tall beside man-made machines, but
don't turn around at the fire of a gun.
Taste the finest wine leftover from the rich, but
bet against a welfare that nurtured your youth.

A past that failed to remind them to
feel more alive and that you somehow belong
in the simplest of photographs, where
you promised yourself you would not die that way
(long before strangers dared declare war).

And while fewer men swim back to safety,
and black bombshells are emptied at sea,
you will run away on a train like the man right beside you
who's story begins exactly as yours:

All the strangers on the left,
All the lovers on the right;

an unpublicized, cliche irony
that no stranger nor lover could ever explain
as they isolate themselves
to sit arrogantly and wonder
why do our wars never seem to end?