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 offthe 70-foot-high factory ceiling like they should be heardby all the worldbut somehowit would be like putting a beautiful wild Bengal Tigerin a cageclipping the wingsof an African Grey parrot skimming the topsof Brazilian rainforest trees as a rainbowappearstelling the pool player in Van Gogh’s hellish The Night Caféhe will be in a paintingsomeday worth 10 million dollarsa meteor can’t help streaking across a skya cat doesn’t know howit leaps from a 12th-storey windowand livesa Joe Louis punchwas born before the first poemwas ever spokenwould you tell Marlon Brando to look into a mirrorright before he yells, “STELLA!”in A Streetcar Named Desirewhen I walk around my machine gripping this wrenchamong all these men real and natural as Niagara FallsI never readShakespeare or Shelley or walked the hallsof UCLA PhD school in English literatureand I look over at the man at the next machineas a drop of cutting oil drips from his brushonto the razor-sharp flutes of a 5-pound tool steel cutter in his fist40 years ago he rode a boxcaracross midnight Arizona sands to getto this machine shopwhen he was 19 and homeless and could barely read a wordbut how can I ever tell himall the poems there ever were or ever will beshineinside that drop of goldencutting oil.