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.
At first they’re ghosts,
puffy eyed and white as money,
unpeeling themselves from the cocoon of the plane.
Then they are red as shellfish,
wearing shades and fear
as if their flight hibernation
were still clinging
and predators were crouched
behind every door.
Then after a few days of sun,
stupid in the heat,
they flick notes and order cokes
and beers before midday,
and lie idle with a book rested
on the bridge of their nose.
Then they eat out:
breakfast, lunch and dinner, dispensing currency as if
they weren’t sure what it meant,
fingers fumbling like a stutter’s punctuated speech.
And then their skin
becomes brown and golden
and they find their wits
and barter skill, becoming fluid.
Yet still they are adrift our money, and play careless with phones beyond our reach and watches from TV and jewlery adorning, as if they inhabited another world where affluence is a normal, everyday right
not a rarity for the people.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
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