Light.
Weightlessness.
The doors of the train spring open and I leap aboard.
It seems even the commuters are living brighter days:
one shoots me a grin as I jump on,
I smile back, perhaps slightly too much.
Breaking the barriers we build between one another seems unthinkable at times.
But today I can smile too much:
today I can open up my life to the world, to a stranger,
and feel it grinning back,
and disregard the judgement in the sallow faces
of the office workers and bankers, and
drench myself in the warmth of bustling people,
and laugh my way along broken escalators
and skip down vacant carriages on delayed trains.
Between Bank and Monument I hear a busker,
wheedling voice and a twanging guitar,
60 cents flat on half its strings
60 cents sharp on the other.
The effect is off-kilter, slightly mad.
Normally disconcerting, even irritating,
fuzzy discords emanating down the stifling corridors of a crowded subway, but
Today it is free, liberated,
from tuning systems and stern teachers,
like a wild song yodelled by a fisherman
into the great water-walls of the eye of the storm.
Shout louder, he is thinking,
Because when my voice o’erreaches
The tumult and the deluge
The storm will fade and be gone
Comments