Train Ride (05.06.09)

This is not the first time,
And I am not the first,
To take this journey;
Cross these counties
In an unnatural, unflinching line.
Embarking upon the inane train -
Never travelling; no sojourn,
For this air-conditioned inertia
Never leads to weeks
Spent lounging Inertiatic
On the shores of the Adriatic,
Or some other common folly.
No gateway to holiday.
It’s remarkable.
It variegates; it changes,
Each time I glean along it…

I’ve seen it a tundra –
Barren. Empty. Sparse
Cold
Wrought in midwinter’s vice.
All the small bodies
Of water
Sheened in their Perspex barriers,
Separating swan from fish with
Ice.
All along the concourse
Is the acrid powder;
Gritty hibernic death.
Even the pylons seem to sag overhead,
Like the old folk in the carriage.
And the loamy hills roll grey
Like the storms of Thor.
Unpicturesque is Albion’s shore.

I’m sure I’ve seen it yellow.
As the sun infects each
Nook of shade.
Making everything seem brighter.
Yellow trees;
Yellow tinted blue sky
Yellow swathes of the sun’s rape crop.
All the garden nourished;
Germinating towns, (some larger than others).
Every place I scantly see,
Whilst shuttling down the track.
I am perennially walled in with greenery
Which occasionally gives way,
To armies of woad-stained sheep.

The experience is peculiar.
My vision is drawn to this garden,
Along the way
Of this rapid panorama
That I’ve seen before,
In green. In grey.
But, I sense,
I Taste. Touch. Smell nothing,
I do not hear the things I see.
I am deaf to nature
From within this sanitised shape.
Perverse dichotomy;
I am wholly at odds with my eyesight,
Like the thicket-framed railings I continue to pass -
All juxtaposed;
The rogue sense giving me something surreal
Before it pulls in at the last stop
And the scene becomes inane
And all which was yellow and grey
Is gone.