This train trip going home from work, perhaps

Would frighten me from going home at all

If such things were still (or ever) accounted horrible.

Carriages of staring, hollow-eyed ghosts,

The monks who worship the mighty god “work”,

Who take their meagre pays and do not ever think to shirk.

Thankful indeed for the burdens they bear,

In a landscape of grey they are stagnant –

Like a pool of slimy, enervated, oily fragments.

The trains are grey and the sky is greyer,

But grey-faced crowds frequently puzzle me –

Unthinking, unseeing, unwilling to run or be free.

I wonder how these faces earn livings,

As they cover the insides of their trains,

Unable to use or to entertain their feebled brains.

I wonder if I am better or worse

As a single seat bears me home again,

Entertaining my feebled brain with thoughts concerning them.