James Atkins - Dissipation

Creatures of habit, they choose the same carriage,
making a journey that punctuates their shortening lives
like a space between paragraphs at the end of each day,
lost in a soulless addiciton to routine
marketed as happiness in burger advertisements.

Pools of light thrown by streetlamps,
electric orange smeared along windows made lenses
by streaming black rain and those humid exhalations,
that escape from commuters one sigh at a time
each mired in dull resignation.

Avoiding the expressionless faces of others,
but catching warped glimpses of the night
as if through someone else's glasses,
sharing a desire to cut this hour from their lives
an incremental suicide of convenience

The noise of their passage tamped down by rainfall
Burning threads of unwanted time trailing behind
laid down over those from yesterday, and the day before that
in a collapsing tunnel of displaced tranquility
dying in the wake of the 6.14 Express to Camberwell.

James Atkins

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dissipation/