Will the real Slim Shady please look up? — AlecPain

Will the real Slim Shady please look up?

I keep coming back to this entrance/exit at Liverpool Street station. I love the way the lights seem to fold themselves in and out of the silhouettes of the commuters (or is it the commuters folding themselves in and out of the light?)

I attempted to write something which is almost a poem, with a mix of lyrics (from The Darkness, Madonna to Ella Fitzgerald and The Shadows), to books and poems (Elizabeth Smart, Pound, TS Eliot, Nabokov and Dylan Thomas). Essentially it’s about doing your own thing: the opposite of what everyone else is doing. POEM BELOW IMAGE.

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Will the real Slim Shady please look up?

E-smart, by Liverpool Street station, they stood and schlept
Each of them fixing their eyes before their hands kept
high in front of them
Pounding at the station of the metro
the apparition of these shapes in the crowd
like John Shades, from the outside
are pale fires duplicating, multiplying.
They’re going where the light shines brightly
They’re going for an hour or three
They’re becoming mystery men and women, The Shadows:
Hank, Jet, Brian and Bruce reflected in Cliff’s glow.

So what if the man in the spectacles
is making a spectacle of himself, by walking the other way?
He’s beginning to see the night, shadow boxing in the dark
He can hear the rhythm of his heart
and he’s heading back into the Darkness:
going intelligently into that good night.
He’s just standing there, getting to it
Striking a nose, there’s really nothing to it.

In a station of the metro

We are family