The Monday train offered a rare palette
to my listless locomotive eyes.
Despite a glorious sun
the hills issued a stubborn monochrome
to the blue expanse above
as Nature dutifully hid her innocence
beneath the weekend’s virgin snow.
Inside
God’s people bond
by electronic ritual;
outside
we overtake clouds,
perched in an urgent corporate cradle
nested between the skin and the sky.
The train speeds me south,
dizzy from an ever-changing aesthetic
which I struggle to comprehend.
Behind
I leave my father’s mother alone
with her sea view,
Carol Vorderman,
her stubborn old age,
and a failing body,
which no amount of Soya milk will solve.
{
The traffic below collides with Mendelssohn,
offering a soundtrack for our waking.
Out of the arms of sleep,
entwined in the arms of another,
I watch the morning peer through the blinds,
hinting at the day ahead.
The sudden electronic protest
cannot halt the march of time
and our moment is over
nearly as soon as it has begun.
I fear the stolen hours are bound to find me out
before the day is past.
The lift casually tosses me out into the street
where the icy grip
of Tuesday’s picture postcard scene
soon shakes me from my slumbers.
I walk home through the duck-littered park;
hands firmly entrenched in my winter coat,
alone
with the snow,
and some second-hand thoughts.
{
Wednesday, in a room full of bum bags,
challenged by lively combinations of colour and flesh
I sit,
waiting to be reunited
with the flighty gross machine
that will carry me
from this unpronounceable place.
Devoid of the urge to join the masses
in their motional quest to queue,
I muse on the lines of a face and frame
to which I will never have a name;
I wait,
ashamed by the naivety of my tongue
and the sudden shameful silence
of my sullen alien blood.
The twenty third transient hour
offers a few minutes of respite
for my frail jet-lagged ego.
My camera would love it here,
an infinity of rectangles
to find amongst the foreign.
But the brief snapshot barely develops,
before I close my eyes
and embrace a fleeting sleep.