So we're watching the commerce of life pass us by.
Parked round the concourse like tableaux vivants,
uncomfortable people in wheelchairs, we're not quite all there.

With an arm or leg missing or bloated because of some pump that has failed,
we are waiting for grumbling porters
whose language is new but outmoded like Birmingham New Street itself.

Then with one shove we're out from the well-tailored masses,
the able and blameless, the ordinary travelers,
away from the polished floors, walls with their softly evasive pink tones,
and through to the monochrome goods lift,
its walls battered black like a butcher's meat block.
The lift squeals and lowers us down to the basement,
an unpainted underfloor linking the platforms,
conducting red cables to their unknown business.

It's here where the work of the station gets done;
and only at this point the porters relax, snap their knuckles
just over our shoulders. Their talk
is of "meat packets", "transfers", the "fully confined".
These words have been sheared and shifted,
yanked round on top of their deep-pile foundations, they've lost their true line,
are leaning, encrusted with calcite indifference.

Now look how the fabric of New Street is wearing:
russet water is dripping from seams in the concrete
and has been since Day One: the internal metals are rusting.

While up above, in sad malls five stories high,
the industrial carpet that is flooring the corridors
is gummed with grime and shined up by the shoppers' slow foot steps.

Sliding doors jitter and jam.
All this is weighed up by the new generation of planners
who find no saving graces.

The future demands a decision:
it's all coming down.

Which is OK by us in the basement, especially if D-Day comes
suddenly early
crushing us into a last close embrace with the porters.
Hundreds dead, thousands trapped;
commerce and travel gone cold;
an arm through the rubble, the girl from John Menzies,
still holding out somebody's change.

photoscape
(full graphics)