A Traveller’s Sweet Moment

All the various people toing and froing with bags pause as heads tilt to orange lights capitalising arrivals, departures, long lists of destinations, or mill about waiting to board.

A deisel thrums, fuming up the place, and a tannoy mumbles. The sun shines, diffused through skylights stained with pigeon droppings.

And in this intersecting place which is no real destination, I find happiness in the happening of reality unfolding, suddenly miraculous as if the being in me, my heart, had melted like butter in the dish next to the half eaten croissant disintegrating on a plate.

And as the guard blows a whistle my insides break from something solid to a free flowing fluid made of nothing but lightness and space and the joy of dying, where all paradoxes balloon inside until my skin seems a transitory coating, a boarder and yet an open door, a bubble’s width transparency, in which, and through the world I momentarily glide.

Epoque

In the black and white photograph
the 19th century station bustles with
top hats and ladies in feathered felt,
and there isn’t a man without a
moustache or sideburns flanking.

Hot bellied locomotives simmer
in the sidings and polished carriages
queue in timely lines while walruses
inspect pocket watches and point at
the world with portly cigars.

There isn’t a thing out of time: every
article existing is touched by the age,
coloured by fashions of the mind;
the ladies fine frocks of puff
petticoats and pinafores, the hiss

and mist of escaping steam, the
brass tubing veining engines, the
great hall aloft on stanchions of cast
iron. Even the tea cup and train ticket
exude époque and the purity of

happenings coinciding to form all
that was in that moment then. And
when I look I can’t find a thing that
seems unreal. Is this a trick? Will my
decedents look upon the vistas of

our time and see rich nostalgia
colouring the skin of everything. Or
will they see the lack of meaning by
which we shape, steer and live our lives
and want no part of its empty shame?

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015