Express Train

Door open, hurtling loud and at full speed towards my destination, beneath me a blur of mounded ballast and withered grass, the world coming into focus more the further out I look - graffitied fences, factories still wearing the soot of steam trains from decades before, a mountain of stacked wooden pallets, car wrecks piled four high. Late sixties, on my way to work on the 7.10 from Alberton, all stops to Cheltenham then express to the City. The station names flash by, Woodville, Kilkenny, Croydon, Bowden all pass dreamlike through a disconnected stare. A vague residual left by the thoughts back then still seem to slop around my memory. I can feel panic claw on the window trying to get out. I arrive fifty five years later, on time, here, a world away looking out on a soft fall of summer rain. My journey has gone by all too fast on the 7.10 express train.