At Paddington Station, in a tunnel
just off the platforms, you want to capture
images of faces & bodies with memory
not camera--the ancient pickling mode.
Impossible. Commuting workers
stride with purpose verging on menace.
Tourists--sluggish, confused, quarrelsome,
sweaty, laden. . . . The tunnel space
seems eager to ingest people (it has
seen them all already, the Alis and
the Bens, the Antonios, Angelikas,
and Vlads, the Prufrocks, Sukis,
Eriks, and Khans). Such tunnels
snake like arteries through urban
bodies, delivering toil to the maw
of the Economy, serving sweat-labor
and schticks of expertise, nutrients
of the perpetual Now. The proper
English woman's voice narrates
train-info ("with breakfast service
to Swansea"), a positive-thinking
pigeon head-thrusts into the mix,
content with crumbs. What a seething
thing is a big city, but every person
is still one person, loaded with duty,
aches, words, terrors, whole worlds
of thought hiding behind stoic faces.
A mind among millions, holding on,
holding off insanity and defeat.
A large sign states WAY OUT. Its
message is a mirage. And so it is
if you're a certain you, you'll enter
stage-lit platorms to board a serpent-
snouted Great Wester Railway train
to Cardiff, from where you'll go to
Aberdare in search of dark grey
headstones and places where
the dead once walked, worked,
and wondered. They couldn't see
your present, the future. You can't
see their past, that present.
Ghost trains roll
by each other silently on tracks
laid down by Time.
hans ostrom 2024
