My Morning Commute Epitome

Sound attempt and after hours I'm still not sure it's any better!

I am on my morning commute,

the train is filling up stop-by-stop until I am surrounded by bodies,

I feel like cattle going to market, packed in we rattle down to our destinations in these metal cages.

Forced into awkward embraces we move in unison, supporting ourselves through the tracks’ twists and turns as if we were suspended on a rollercoaster.

I am so close to my neighbour that I can read every detail of their distant eyes,

the perfume of freshly washed hair consumes my senses and I feel squeaky-clean skin polishing up against mine,

with little warmth shown amongst these strangers I warm my shivering fingers by the heat of my phone.

And as I look around I find everyone transfixed by the same show playing between their hands,

worlds balanced between thumbs and fingers like two curtains opening onto the centre stage,

here play self-constructed realities programmed to our own limited agendas,

I stand and watch the scene engrossed.

It seems that we prefer to occupy ourselves with celebrity gossip,

passing the minutes zooming into airbrushed images,

photos so different from the originals that we barely recognise their beautiful faces.

You see it’s easier to consider the life of one star than contemplate the fate of thousands,

so we limit ourselves to the quick fixes of distraction that satisfy our need to fill this time.

It’s then, drowning in this sea of screens and silence I realise we have become disconnected from the realities around us,

could it be that our senses have been numbed, so anesthetized by overexposure that we are no longer stunned by the atrocities recounted on our crystal clear screens.

And the vision may be high definition yet we still miss the looks of desperation,

and how loud must the surround sound be to hear the cries of our global friends?

Today I can switch off to the sight of death at the press of a button.

As our horizons shorten to the focus of our two-inch screens,

we become entwined in the familiar, venturing no further than the circumference of our own circle of friends,

it is our friends that form the ends of a protective blanket wrapped around us,

it holds us so tight that we cannot step out to help those in need from other walks of life, even when they stood right in front us.

We tell ourselves that the problems around us are not our problems,

it’s the benefit system, it’s immigration, the economy, their culture,

you see they just didn’t try as hard enough.

Yet everybody knows that the toil of Sisyphus was infinite, and there was no reward for his endless output.

We could offer a helping hand to our fellow passengers, make their loads a little lighter, make their space a little larger,

But ‘our hands are tied’ we say, and they are tied-

tied to our phones, plugged into superficiality, charging on consumerism and wired to our egoisms,

we could put down our prisons, free our hands to focus on things that really matter: the implosion of our world and those within it.