WRITING

This is The World Is Round, But Don't Tell The Pigeons - Colin's writing editorial. Here Colin will upload his poems & examples of his writing for the first time. The title is inspired by the flying rats who prey hell. But not every entry will necessarily feature them. This section will also host guest contributions.

The Human Inconvenience

Speeding along inside of this meticulous human design

Jackets of bark cling on to their sprawling owners, parting their way

Together with the fields, they are safely set aside from us

We are are the more transient ones

We travel in carriages

Place names pass by on rickety fences

Signposts that neatly represent the happy and sad locales

We travel through the space in between

Fields exhale oxygen

And livestock tear at the supply

A castle with turrets is pointing at a luminous sky

It stretches out to a future known

How long do you wait until somebody jumps onto the tracks?

Despite the wait of their life as lived before they jumped

there will be always be insufficient time to erect a signpost to mark the spot as it happens

Although such a thing would forever prick curiosity - but who could have planned for it?

This, the place where death decides to visit

The train driver's clock takes the time of death

This cutting off of one human supply

The enduring bark, steadfast, wins the day once again

When it comes it will be a shocking display of finality

But we will feel nothing in the carriages other than the dent in our onward plans

And the news of this plundering will represent another fateful locale

A meticulously planned end

And the train-spotter's notepad

Orderly and lined

Will have a designated page at the back to document these spillings of blood

A column where the tip of the pencil will not waver in the hand

But

All accounts will say nothing of the well-planned trees

And the different shades of the fine, aged bark, and how they creak to one another at night

They will fail to mention the meditative stare of the busy horse on the seated cow's back

Or the small towns and their faces brought to a comic standstill by our passing through

These reports both verbal and digital will not mention the many and variously complicated onward paths

of the lives that are affected by the act

They will not speak of the previously upheld success of the worker's maintenance of the tracks

This once ordinary route now made inconvenienced and noteworthy

This bastardisation of a worker's area

Where trains speed through

Carrying lives whose ancestor's will have mapped out their course

Along which a human act of escape can make a merry mockery of a timetable

Ultimately, there will be no one to say how beautiful was her leap onto the tracks

She, the untidy prick of a system punctured

This fallibility of a world that we are all now a part of, even the horse

In that, we have all joined a club

That in itself is a pig-pen of sorts

A way of keeping us tidy

A place where this gathering of human livestock can be made orderly

Filled into oblivion

Housed

Aligned within tracks that wind along a meticulously-designed earth

Fragile and forever vulnerable to it:

The beautiful leap.

A New Front

A great muddy cloud has entered my head

A search for a soul that is easily led

Let it fight

Let it oppose

Let a new weather begin

For a soul has a spirit

And a heart its wind.

The London Underground

relentless,

The Victorian's sad joke of infinity of destination and bad manners.

We can all still dream of personal space.

But late in the evening it is a success,

Arms and faces and legs folded

and able to breath,

Sealed human envelopes in recognition of a day lived,

Faces translucent,

their energy sapped,

But having achieved.

Urban delights can be found below the pigeon-soiled pavements:

A well-spoken commentary.

There is a search for a crock of gold

that may be a home,

or a wife

or a lover, waiting.

Tiled bricks of homogeneous design and dimension,

and arrows like pointing fingers

will guide you to such a destination.

There can only be two outcomes:

you go backwards or forwards.

Step back on the train and limbs are once again

rendered redundant,

or go home feeling mortal.

Is is a will to guide or be guided,

A Victorian possibility realised.

A modern vision of forever, renewed,

and revealed in daily lives,

living and moving below some others.