On a train to Brighton from Victoria, I don’t know if this was even 2005 as the entry is undated. It was not long before the old slam-door trains were replaced. Whenever I was travelling at night I would stand for the journey, in the vestibule between the carriages, I would open the window because you could. Not just a small window, the full window in the door slid down. An opening large enough for an adult to climb out of. Often the lightbulb in the corridor went out, leaving that piece of corridor completely dark, your eyes adjusted and the nighttime landscape came alive. It was after a journey like this I wrote the following.
Atlantic Road meets Coldharbour Lane, I wait to turn the corner here, hiding in the shade of the railway bridge. Looking out at the blue sky backed buildings, that stand, and I imagine are really flat, like a scenery backdrop.
Coldharbour Lane on a baking hot day. I grew up just off of Coldharbour Lane. Which is a lie, but also the truth, I fled here. It was them or me, life or death. It saved me, here I first tasted life, and learned to be. I learned to breathe on Coldharbour Lane. The light changes. I cross the street and turn the corner.
The world is made of words
future, past, and here and now.
Language is the glue that holds the mess together.
Love and Hate are made of words,
—you can’t have one without the other.
Thats not to say that hate is right,
the past has tried in many ways
to warn us that it isn’t.