(Unfinished Journey home)

Rolling home through the night from a southern city

Rolling past early rising liquid gold landscapes

Rolling across rising morning mist scape.

Dark branch skeleton trees silhouette against dawn grey,blue pink tinged fringed sky.

I rub the sleep from my eyes

But there is nothing else to do but sleep.

On the long road home

Just sit back and succumb to the rythm of the the rails

Get in trance with the tracks.

Rain spatters on the window

And the whole world becomes blurred and impressionist

Drifting off into smudgey woods, smudgey fields,

Smudgey houses, smudgey sheep.

Crossing the heart of nowhere

I’m glad to be passing through and not living in some of these smudgey nowhere places

On a bank, cut into a hillside

The railway snakes high along a winding river

The railway neatly follows every curve, every meander, every bend.

I fits perfectly

Did God make the river to fit the railway?

The countryside melts messily into a recognisable urban mass that might just be a large town.

Suburban outlands of similar houses

Each one ony distiguishable from the next, by the different clothes dangling, dancing and flailing round on windy washing lines.

Down the tracks to the sidings and shunting yards with wagons all marshalled and ready to move

Ener the station.

There are people on platforms.

Where are they all going so early in the morning at this indecent hour?

They are all washed, dressed, pressed

Packed, and wrapped up against the morning chill.

The train stops and they board.

The night train is now a commuter train where the dishevelled human remnants of the southern city mix with gents in suits and bad tied early morning ties, and ladies in sensible shoes (high heels in the handbag).

The newcomers board and the stuffy sleepy odour gives way to new morning smells.

We drift out again from town to the big city.

Urban sprawls it’s way into flat tundra agriculture country,

Nowhere places with no stations flash by.

Dead dwellings

Pylons

Grain silos

And the first fringe of the big cty satellite estates.