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included
in pamphlet, The Announced, 2009, Sylph Editions,
in
3-part book: Ellipsis 1, ISBN 978-0-9558896-5-3
The Announced
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.
Ruth Valentine
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