Crewe

The cold air of Crewe railway station, platform eight, suffocates the lonely. Isolated couples consolidate heat in a loving embrace. Christ it’s grim. A graveyard to steam.

He works the Welsh Steel. Always on the platform when I arrive. As he boards the train seeking his place the light catches his forehead, flattened by lifes dull impressions. He sits down.

Sporadic delivery. Tripping out words he cannot control. Disjoint thought, firing memories, causing the delivery of words in a none sequential sequence.

Sentences no longer contain the formal grammar. No I, we he she it or the full stops. There is no full stop. He’s talking concepts, prime words linking to other prime words. He has no time for the words that cushion or fill out a line. Time is precious, and his delivery fast as a result. He lives in the 24/7 world.

What he talks about he has seen before. Patterns in life can now be shortened. As a consequence of this he can only communicate with those who have experienced the same patterns. Lighting described as standing waves magnetic fields, crashing sensitive communication equipment, whoosh, all gone. Relationships follow the supermarket baked beans pattern; packaging is everything.

It’s nothing new. Ring a ring o roses is enough to trigger the collective memory of the plague, and the stench of death, provided who he talks to is historically aware. If not he appears to be a loon.

Is that why cities hold an attraction? They may contain works of art, but in essence there is higher degree of concepts being shared. Shared concepts linked by prime words.

As if the world had gone to sleep without the human content. All is possible. A clean slate. When it wakes I want to be there.