Ghosts On The Red Line

Riding the train again.. all these years now on the Red Line..sleepy workers with chains of ID hung round our necks like talisman, screaming tourists children swinging on the hand rails, and the flickering images half seen and half imagined out dirty windows. More and more now I have these small daydreams as we rock and sway under the city......I startle awake as we stop at Dupont Circle, and then back to these half dreams.. Jan on that beach watching Lake Huron... kissing Davida under the moonlight, Sheila's scent on my fingers as I picked up my guitar, Nicki in a taxi on 48th street, blues on that Naw'lins station with sweat in my eyes, the housewife south of Kalamazoo, Kiwi in the shadows of Salt Lake... all these ghosts filling my head...and I wonder is this just the price for the life I've lived, is this the cost of loving more than once or twice?
If you could have told me all those years ago when I was a sandy virgin on that beach with Jan that some day I'd be old and dreaming and seeing her face on a dirty subway window.. I don't think I would have understood.... I didn't have the vision then...I'd never seen the ghosts.