Application

Each application takes something from you. The first few are special, you check your emails and you wait for the post that never comes. Quiet rejection then becomes normal; you apply with less commitment and become cold to the nothingness that greets your efforts. Time alone is forced upon you in the hours between your old start and your old finish and you notice what you once rushed passed. Your highs and lows also struggle without the restrictions they once felt, taking you to places that keep you going and to places you never want to go again. Simple conversations are hard, you're happy to discuss the state of the world but you stutter an answer to questions once embraced or ignored. What do you do? Reminds you of what you want to do and ruins the answer with truth. Such conversations are avoided, such friends become less involved in this new world of yours, in which you dwell on the remainder of an existence that once knew how to exist. Hope remains, though the months wear away its soft exterior and leave a hard raw material that provides a base to roll you over each morning, most mornings. What's left of you fights the empty space it once filled, looks with uncertainty on the certainty of others and writes another application.

It Wasn't meant to be

It didn't take my fancy or seem to fancy me
So I left it and stayed at home for free

I never got the train, never made it to the cut
I never saw the sunset or told the one I love

I missed the alarm clock, louder in my ear
I missed what didn't hit me and didn't stand for fear

I fought without fighting, I lost without a loss
I fought myself, circled fate with a cross

I forgot the consequences, defied them all
I forgot to hope, took the push and claimed a fall

It didn't seem relevant, didn't call out to me
It wasn't meant to be

He Drove Home

He saw her walking to the car and she smiled as if looking in a mirror. "I didn't buy the grey ones" she said, as she opened the car door, the words taking with them any meaning he thought their relationship had left.

Another City

The people of another city unite in their existence. They work hard and raise a smile, walk through sun lit streets in hot, dark suits wishing the day was bleak and that the sun would save itself for Sunday. They stand in trailing job centre queues failing to see the way forward of the council motto or of the solicitor tightening his belt. They pick up their pension with a smile and a joke for a friend but with the knowledge of time to justify contempt. They drive the bus and get thanked by those who wait. They pour another pint with a welcoming grace and a reminder of the warmth of company. They take part in a hedonistic downing of tools, knowing Monday will come but unwilling for the rest of the day to be anything like it.

Space

Everywhere I go I like to imagine the space differently, the station roof or the structure of the pillars bellow the dock, the closely knit trees and the overhead compartment of the train. I imagine making it my home, building in a place to sleep and a gap for a view. I imagine a world in which it could be done, in which everybody had the freedom to use the space, to leave the overhead compartment with a moving picture of the country and to stumble upon a tree house in north Wales that would keep them for the night.

Leaving Bristol

A woman waved at the train with a bunch of yellow flowers and in her eyes, standing there in the allotment, I could see the beautiful madness of waving at those she had no knowledge of. She was the alternative in the sun. She was the self righteous, privileged and beautiful Bristol I had come to know, a place where more people believe it is possible to be yourself than anywhere I have known.

The Railway Line

Girls sit drinking
Beyond a valley of houses
On a platform, shivering
Amongst those in suits

Who half look over
Disaproving, quietly
Resenting the laughter
And confidence, of those

Who fail to understand
You have to go down
The line, have to
Save up your smile