Where Systems and Stanzas Meet

There’s a particular vibe at Walthamstow Central on a Sunday morning that doesn’t exist at any other station on the line. An odd sense of quiet... not quite a gap in the noise, more like a bend in it. The trains arrive slower. The announcements echo in a way that makes you feel like the voice has somewhere better to be. I like that.

I’ve been thinking lately about how poetry and infrastructure have more in common than you might expect. Both are systems built for movement. Both rely on structure, repetition, rhythm. Both are ways of getting something from one place to another. Not always fast. Not always directly. But eventually.

The Tube, for instance, is full of line breaks.

Literal ones, of course, but also the kind you feel in your body. That jolt when the Central Line speeds up betwen stations. The screeching when the Victoria Line goes round a bend. The weight shift of the escalators. The pause between one sentence and the next on the tannoy, as if the train itself is considering its options.

I write poems on the Tube a lot - possibly more than I've written them anywhere else since I moved to London four-and-a-half years ago. There’s something about being underground that feels safe, almost clandestine. No signal, no notifications. Just motion. Pause. People at their most vulnerable. I scribble things between stops and promptly forget what they meant. Then I read them weeks later and remember every thought, every feeling.

That’s the thing, I think. Infrastructure is memory. Poetry is too.

I’ve been writing poems about the London Underground. At first it wasn’t on purpose. They just kept showing up. Quiet little observations between Tottenham Hale and Highbury & Islington. Odd metaphors in the movements of the carriages. Small moments that felt important for no good reason.

Eventually they started to feel like something bigger.

Later this year, I’ll be publishing a small collection called Tube Lines. It’s a strange little thing, full of unminded gaps and overheard things, flirtations and feelings, and maps that don’t quite lead where they say they do.

You’ll hear more about it soon. But for now, just this:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSomewhere between Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road,Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publisheda man whispered “sorry” to a stranger’s suitcase,Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedas if it might carry the grudge all the way home.

That man’s apology has been riding the Central Line ever since. I still sometimes wonder if the suitcase ever forgave him.

Until next time...