Shunting Trains

I stand here pissing in this narrow shithole of a toilet, staring up through the little slit of a window at a sky the colour of a dead man’s face. little worms of light wriggle across my vision, the cheap vodka still working its way through me.

the place smells like something that crawled in and died, mixed with the sweet rot of damp and a sharp sting of mothballs drifting up from God knows where – like my grandmother’s drawers when I was a kid, full of yellowed letters nobody ever answered.

the wall’s black with soot, and the ghosts of a thousand underground trains cough their lungs out all night on the northern line below.

scrawled on the tiles –

“For a good time, call Martha 083-2791903.”

another lie in this concrete box, where drunks dream of something cheaper than salvation. the Sunday-evening train shunts hard beneath me, a low iron groan that rattles my bones and sounds almost like mercy in my drunk skull. the cistern keeps dripping its tired little song, steady and going nowhere, same as me.

I shake off, zip up, rinse the piss and the day off my hands under water the colour of weak tea, and walk back to the bar where the same bastards are still pretending tomorrow won’t come.

fingers dial the code,
Martha’s silence echoes deep,
call again someday.