Wednesday 21 March 2012

Catching the 19:47 from Liverpool Street

In love, is there a manner in which these two things,

The madness, or stupidity,

Can be separated?

Is it the two sides of the same coin or the reflection

Of the ghost train in the window?

Where someone else who looks like you looks

Out and thinks about the other side.


It was stupidity. Textbooks.

Cheap wine and chips covered in cheese like rubber.

Madness to be thinking about it at all.

(What use will worrying do? Be. )

It was the budding stem of a flower left blooming in the throat,

Coughed up into a tissue and thrown away again.


And the bin was undoubtedly the best place for it.


In the world of the ghost train

Was the girl with shadowed eyes and frazzled hair thinking along the same tracks,

Electrified routes or the dead and cold iron works.

Maybe this parallel train ran into a parallel time or a world where all of those things

Could happen there. Maybe there was no such thing as

Halls. Or girls in other countries that got to keep the heart that still beat next to his.


Did it

Flutter? Like a butterfly under a pin, stuck against a chest expanded with experience and fried bread.

Think strawberry granola and coffee.

The residue of lip stain on white china that served many a conversation

In the secluded corner of a coffee shop

Where two people first held hands.

Secretly, under the sticky table.


There were no hands now. Just eyes; four and all blue.

The clock started ticking again, and we aged,

And life went on and the parallel ghost train split away from my own and was

Momentarily illuminated by the lights of the city.

It could have been anywhere.


The woman sitting in the green seat opposite regarded me with curiosity.

I smiled back at her,

While the ghost-me did the opposite.

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