Look to your left and you see lines and lines of trains. Idle, doors open, each one is a fantastic caravan of dreams to speed you to a new life or keep you dry at night.
Use the footbridge and look down the single track. This could be Guatamala, but it's here - the straight iron rails to ride to anywhere within the reach of your mind's eye.
Graffiti and frogs everywhere tonight, like me out in the dark and the rain. I like this life.
Look to your right and there's the river itself. Getting ever more swollen by these torrential downpours. Moored canal boats also remind me of the possibility of a different kind of life afloat.
Teens on mountain bikes flee. Under the bridge stinks of solvents, the fools, they know not what they do, but look guilty. These three unwise youths seeking Jesus under the stars.
A formation of fifty swans drifting alongside me, gently and majestically through the night. The occasional proud beast rising and serenely spreading his great wings.
Behind me, my flat-block, the glass on the door is shattered and it's beautiful. Like two great cobwebs fabricated by demented spiders - arachnid ballet.
Now recalling one of the best nights of my life. Lying on a bench in a Dutch station, watching the rain cascade down the side of an empty train. A whole other day of train jumping ahead tomorrow. That tomorrow still beckoning - my life feels like that fractured glass in my reckoning.
The cobwebs in the pane, like a set of rails emanating from a central point, out in a great spiral of destinations. The world a series of rivers and railways - multiplicity. Still dreaming of a magic swan to ride the rails with me. Hell, fifty other swans. I never knew swans flocked like that, so beautiful in the rain, so maybe somewhere, right at this moment, there are almost fifty other train jumpers. All of them looking at trains. Perhaps a secret force will one day guide us to meet?
Wanting to become a traveler. Wanting to bite the bullet and get out forever. Visiting my mum's again, washing clothes and wandering if my dreams are merely in vain.
Get off the drink? Get another job? Or run away into the vast open space out there, sleep in stations, streets, parks and trains, drinking beer, without care - nothing in the dark or the rain to fear?
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