A Man Riding the Tube Train

 

A man riding the tube train

Sitting in the sallow grease of his day

His dreams in his father’s briefcase

Dropping the filings of his doubts

Into a pile beneath his shell like nacre

Layers, he hopes one day to find a pearl

 

Doors Opening - tentacles spill on the platform

Her fingers grip the pole

Our man, his pupils dart like sailfish

She’s the same age as his daughter

But her heels are higher, sharper

Pierce him as her flesh calves bulge

 

The dead-eyed crocodilia

Sit in rancid raincoat rows

Thinking of their carrion tallies

As thin-sliced spruce old ladies

Drown the hermetic cries

Of the dead cats in their purses

 

Doors Closing - Back to the map of veins

He learned in faded years from a faded box

And tatty paper scraps, a game

Waiting for the heave and hoe

His hands slide the coarse azure stubble

The upholstery, a swelling microbial footprint

 

Every day the same for stinking miles

Bodies change, the faceless entities the same

Dermis fused, frontiers dissolve yet they’re

As unconnected as the pavement walkers

Every mind a planet sealed away

Each carriage is a cosmos

 

Grey matters peruse pink sheets

Smooth fat fingers separate the pages

Spit-licked lubricant pathogenic

The train - a flesh terrine slow cooked

Studded with bright exotic berries

And sly meat streaks of fat

 

His shiny shoes alight, reflect the arch

The tiles which hold the echoes 

As a hot wind blows through

The dust of the freight sirocco

Burns the script of his corporate throat

Soon he'll see green leaves and birds

And sleep in his familiar hemisphere