Streetcar Ghost Rails: Under N. Highland Asphalt

Lyrics

North Highland Avenue, July.
The air smells of diesel and hot tar.
A city crew is peeling back the skin again.
Another pothole, another ruptured pipe.
The jackhammer bites, then screams.
Not the dull crunch of aggregate,
but a high, metallic protest.
The foreman waves his hand, kill the motor.
And in the sudden quiet, they stare down.
Two parallel lines of rust and patience,
sleeping under the noise.

These are the ghost rails.
The iron bones of the Highland Land Company's dream.
Not a memory, but a thing.
Four feet, eight and a half inches of history,
waiting for the jackhammer's accidental key.
The veins, paved over.
The skeleton, forgotten.
The first pulse of the neighborhood,
entombed and waiting.

The 1890s smelled of creosote and sweat.
The clang of a twelve-pound hammer on a spike.
Men whose names the archives never kept,
laying down a future for a man named Hurt.
They were setting a standard gauge,
a width decided by Roman chariots, two millennia away.
They probably didn't know that.
They just knew the sun was hot, the steel was heavy,
and the trolley had to run by spring.

These are the ghost rails.
The iron bones of the Highland Land Company's dream.
Not a memory, but a thing.
Four feet, eight and a half inches of history,
waiting for the jackhammer's accidental key.
The veins, paved over.
The skeleton, forgotten.
The first pulse of the neighborhood,
entombed and waiting.

It was cheaper to just... leave them.
Progress is often just an act of paving over.
A cost-saving measure, a shrug of the shoulders in 1947,
becomes an accidental archive.
This street isn't a street.
It's a palimpsest.
Layer on layer of hurry and forgetting.
And today's asphalt is just the newest, thinnest page.

The foreman spits.
"Alright, cut it out. We're behind schedule."
The black ooze of the new age comes to cover the old one.
By evening, the cars will roll over it all again.
Never knowing what they're driving on.