A piano melody plays. It’s random with clashing tones and repetitive drones, little notes flicking by as the evening draws in. With muffled voices and faded laughs. And as the lick of the tune goes on, a train dumbly carrying passengers from work to homes rattles on by. One cave to another. One we choose, the other we stay in to pay for the other. You can see the light from the carriage fogging up into mist. With shapes and silhouettes barely visible from where Im lying. A few heads down. Others looking across and out of the window, staring at the strangers blurred by.

It’s night and there’s construction cranes high as skyscrapers dotted around the cityscape. With piercing red lights high above, their glow like fire crackling pushes through into this room and inside.

Im lying down. On a crash mattress, for crashing out on. For thinking less. It’s soft so you fold into it. Like the eggs this morning. Half over one another. The change of scene was nice. Change, can be nice. But the body doesn’t think so. Pesky stubborn silly fool of a body thinks it’s right. Anyway.

It’s alarming how quick a building can be raised. And over the months I’ve seen concrete poured by men in hard hats whacking steel and drilling bolts into machines. A machine world. Nuclear by and by. Linear with hollowed out boxes one day to be filled. Paid for by men in other hollowed boxes.

Blondie comes over and asks “Is it about me again?”. “Not this one”. I say, now turning this into the lie. But words are funny anyway. They change. Like the skyscrapers they start off one way, but soon layers are built. And new raw materials are introduced. And they are stacked atop each other and at some point it’s hard to see what it used to be. The ground is no longer soil. Soft and moulded into what Man seeks. Now it’s concrete. And there are stairs and an elevator shaft, with a cage thats empty going up and down all the day long. It’s different now. There are levels. And in many ways you forget about the soil beneath it all. That once grew grass and rain would form into little puddles that birds would eventually sip from. And then seeds would call it home for a while before reaching up wishing with all of its might, to one day look as big as a skyscraper.

But the piano tune plays. And things remain less serious. With the distant laughters of familiar voices. And the sound of boiling tea. And the trains keep passing by, with slightly less people each time, all until it’s just an empty train. And then the crash mattress folds me up into a world simply sublime.

And so the trains keep passing me by…