Today I wrote in transit, inspired by the act of travelling, and by the wonderful book I am reading, The Icarus Girl, by one of my newly favourite authors, Helen Oyeyemi. It is a poem not about loneliness, for once, but about –
Solitude
People wash over me like waves,
another landscape flowing by a window
that I fold shut and slip into my pocket.
It has been like this forever – just me
and this hundred-and-eighty-degree screen,
these magic lantern slides that change
noiselessly, to keep my mind quiet.
Yet every once in a while they snap with a sigh,
and crowds spill out violently
from my archive of shadows.
In the chaos, all my locks and seals give in.
Encyclopaedia Vanitatum 