Swallowed

rock­ing of the train
lurches from kiev
to brat­is­lava, through
wet forest. this journey
is odyssean, unfastened.
i have swal­lowed the world
and lost sight of land.
i can hardly remember
where I began. this headache
must be indi­ges­tion, a feeble
attempt to pro­cess what
I have learned. squat houses
pass by out­side my window,
sharp con­trast to palatial
extra­vag­ances of cities.
gold res­tor­a­tions, fountains
built while others starved.
if I had to choose between
bread and cir­cuses, I would have
said bread was the more important
for sur­vival. in my capsule
24 hours of sol­it­ary, time is
sur­real and there are no words
for the dingy yellow curtain,
the green plastic blind, the
dirty red carpet. we are travelling
the wrong dir­ec­tion, other than last night,
this land­scape becomes familar
and the famil­iar will seem alien
on my return. bor­ders and space,
lan­guages. I am cross­ing histories
and hos­pit­al­ity. arbit­rary lines
when the real divider is tongue.
we shud­der to a halt next to wagonloads
of rock, next to eleg­ant sta­tions with
iron­work, in the middle of nowhere,
for pre-determ­ined amounts of time
secrets of timetables, secrets of maps
across land, nav­ig­a­tion and ancient paths.