They are all across London,
solemn in not quite warm enough,
not quite rainproof raincoats,
going down
the escalators, standing
obediently on the right, not hurrying.
Or they wait
at the far end of the platform, bent like herons
over the track, the one mouse scuttling
between the rails, the now illegible
scraps of the freebie papers. Some
pace up and down, impatient for the moment
which will terminate here. Soon
they’ll be stripped of even
that vital sign, a verb: due to a person.
It is what they always
aspired to, the state of harmlessness,
to be no longer responsible for holding
the grey sky on their shoulders to stop it crushing
beauty out of the city. They become
(in November, daily) an inconvenience:
At the present time, all trains
are non-stopping at Oxford Circus,
and live for forty years in the night vision
of the driver, the last
being to see them tremble, the aghast
unblinking eyes above the ballooning headlamps.