Bruxelles Midi

A poem about train stations, hellos and goodbyes.

Train stations are strange old places.
Full of yearning and yawning,
sobbing, and slowly sobering old men,
like a jazz club with the lights turned up.

Arriving trains’ doors open wide like a waiting embrace,
with the same aaaah you make
as the first sip of hot chocolate passes your lips,
or the sigh that leaves them as you slip
into a lover’s arms.

But Departures is a different story:
doors chew your luggage as latecomers struggle to their seats,
the announcer dismally declaiming that
‘It will be approximately fourteen hundred hours
to our final destination - the moon.’

At least, home seems so far.
A seat, a sandwich and a hot drink - we play to stall time.
But my stomach churns as the clock turns faster, and we stand
and walk, ever so slowly, to the correct gate.

Why are these walls so spotlessly white
when my heart lurches with every step?
Our hellos and goodbyes should be smeared across them,
like a messy modernist painting.

Instead the words I want to say are sucked away
by the whirring ventilation, and the aching silence left
relies on old clichés for punctuation:
‘I had a lovely time’, ‘Have a safe trip’ and, worst of all, ‘Take care’.

All contrive to stifle any real communication. 

And reduce our final farewell
to a moment of shared commiseration.

Reviews

[dadist poetic]

Nice and simple :) you've described them trains very well :)

[Joe Curtis]

Thanks!

[Ben Martin]

Just read this out loud to myself and realised it's even better than I thought when I first saw it.

[Joe Curtis]

Cheers man, tried to vary the pace with some rhymes, glad you noticed :)

[saroosh]

very nyc

[Joe Curtis]

New York City? Ha, I'll take it! Thanks

[saroosh]

my mistake :p very nice!!