Peering through the greasy windows, oil-smeared by a thousand nodding heads,
I am hypnotised by the blurred shitscape smudging by like a Gerhard Richter scrape, an endless vanishing point of faecal slurry. Telescoping out, I ponder the keyed sov-ringed symbolism etched into the glass, like some pre-historic form of hieroglyphics gauged out by an artless Neanderthal desperate to imprint his mark on civilization, to codify his Being, to stamp his identity on the semiotic emptiness.

As I try to decipher this paean to narcissism – a swirling ragbag of tags and initials – my reverie is splintered by the all-too familiar excuse for tardiness piped into the palpable ennui, randomly plucked from a clutch of piss-poor pretexts. Three hundred pale-faced drones collectively roll their eyes and shuffle their feet. Clustered together, we stare into the middle-distance, searing arc lights picking out our dead-eyed, haunted faces, vacuously gazing into the yawning oblivion opening up, clawing inside ourselves against the impossibility of escaping the crushing banality of our circumstance and proximity to so much humanity – the heat of flesh, the stale sweat, the acridity of breath.

Clamped to the tracks, my mind drifts again and I realise that my life is nothing but a mathematical equation; an intricate nexus of hours, minutes and seconds to which I slavishly adhere. Reality has become a dreary continuum of waking dread and dead time; a temporal matrix, dictated by an ironic timetable, within which I heft my sizeable frame. City to town, station to station, terminus to terminus, platform to platform, train to train. Lose a minute, gain a second, day in, week out; arrival and departure, functioning in a limitless limbo between clock and connection. I have become numerized; I exist purely within the realms of true mathematics. I am a formula, a random collection of someone else’s skewed idea of temporality. I dissolve into the abstract beauty of ideas, atomized into the conceptual ether. I am barely human.

Nauseous, and entertaining murderous thoughts, my mind flashbulbs horrific images: burning cattle trucks, putrescent carcasses, Auschwitz carriages, a conflagration of twisted limbs, coffins full of shit. We are sorry for the delay and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused your journey. I must change my life.