23.07, London Underground

From King's cross, Victoria Line

Hollow eyes cut from end-all parties

The smell of perfume and cheap wine.

A child fans a balloon that streaks down the aisle,

past a couple kissing

she pauses to speak,

her dirty eyes smudged with sadness.

Past a sleeping man in khaki shorts draped in an

england flag, a beer can crumpled, kicked away.

Snapping back on a Korean girl

listening to an ipod with pink earphones,

lost to the swaying rumble and the

roar into the light of

another faded station.

 

She gets off and he gets on and he moves to her with her then gone and gone and the beer cans roll and

we are just existing here, falling into blackness,

A journey that could be any other,

snapped by the lens of raw eyes

that care with an instinct

we long learnt to distrust.

 

A film trail where the fuse is already lit

burning the memory away to confuse it with

anything, a might, a maybe, perhaps something that you

never wanted to be a part of anyway.

 

You can be anyone down here, she says to me with

her smudged smiling eyes,

and the yellow lights flicker above.

 

And so on and so on and so on.

We crash through the night

emerging to lose ourselves

in the stale air of another today.

 

Reviews

[An owl on the moon]

I could sense the darkness.. see the movement of lives interacting... smell the scents all mingling and merging, as are people. Powerfully painted imagery.