An ill wind grinds grit down Broadway,
lining nostrils with fine ash,
kohling the innards of slitted eyes
and a man wrestles a bad LP from his girlfriend's thin arms,
pushing her to the footpath while passers-by wonder at
the length and pitch of her hair.

At the mouth of the underpass another woman waits where
she has stood every day for three years in the frigid breath
of that lavatory of tiles. You imagine that you smell piss
and plonk, and like other commuters, keep your eyes
on the blue cavity of light at the other end-
all sleep-walkers with dolomite legs.

The winds of Ultimo hoick up and along and into
a cavern where a Christian Scientist from Dubbo wears a sombrero
and where the skeleton of a whale swings sombre
from the vaulting overhead.

The suburbs of the Eastern Line are chanted by a pedantic Italian,
and though you have never been that far, you know the names by heart,
like the names of the Dearly Departed in Mass
when you were a kid, especially Anastasia Chad.

It is windy, always, on Platform Four.
You strand youself on a bench next to giant scales
and huddle your elbows into your ribs to fill the spaces.
Guards' whistles inflate with girlish screams and luggage trolleys
trundle like glass-eyed Hare Krishnas coming when there is
nowhere to hide.

A brown bird hops at the edge of the chasm, picking at pie crumbs
scattered by a man in crimplene trousers stained at the crutch,
and the air at the back of your neck slides cold,
as though some liquid grime-thing is fingering there.

You focus on millions of specs of silica
in the surface of the platform.
A man hits a chocolate vending machine and
an engaged couple, she small and in a long red coat,
he tall and puzzled, walk past holding hands;
she saying: As soon as possible,
he saying: Maybe never, with their feet
to a square-jawed Slavic woman
in ironed blue overalls
chasing a brown three-legged dog with
a wide black-bristled broom. You can see she is
struck by the orphaned look of its
pendulous tan balls.

Whoever said HG Wells dreamt up the Time Machine?
That hot fluid has stopped in this labyrinth,
slowing to the momentum of lava
a million years after the consumptive earth has slagged its sulphur.

Deliverance jerks into life on other platforms,
Two and Three rescued long ago.
The wind pokes at their emptiness, and prizes more
from under seats, behind toilet walls, waiting-room corners.

Has there been a disaster? you wonder;
a crush of soft and unsuspecting bodies matting together
only stations away?
The few people on the platform who have companions
stop talking and start waiting, as though an awful death is on its way.

It is too cold tonight for a train to be late.
The thought of it makes even the sweepers look lonely.

Then you see it coming and believe in it again,
as though you never questioned; and
when it arrives you leave the urinal smells behind and
it feels like home for the first three seconds
while you find a ripped seat next to a window
and the carriage convulses into movement,
slow past the Mortuary, tipping and creaking toward Redfern.

You watch the window to claim it, now mesmerized
by skinny terrace houses with dried-out backyards,
empty tricycles in mounds of pumpkin vine,
scrags of towel hanging from lines, forgotten by someone.
The forgotten things make you sad.
Those red brick tenements, Gents' Rooms above tailors' shops,
the empty look of them jabs at the canyons inside you,
makes the soles of your feet ache, your larynx fat.
Makes in you a longing to open those stiffened letterbox lids,
swagger along those dark paths overhung with privet,
whistle up passageways stinking of kitchen gas, cats in rut,
cold chips.

Makes you long to know those other lives;
makes you crazy and sad with longing.

Are there empty snail shells under the grey hydrangeas?
Does the woman behind those drab curtains bleed heavily?
Does the glossy man who fries fish in the corner shop
stroke the children who come in for five cents' worth of Fruit Cocktails
with cushioned fingertips?

The lit up Tooheys man lifts his schooner up and down,
the sky opposite a raspberry cordial red
behind zigzag roofs and smoke-stacks.
The eye of a white-ice planet follows you
with a stranger's sharpened stare.

Headlights switch on along a highway
that scoots under the bridge like a dirty canal.
Beyond a billboard for Husqvarna sewing machines
a little girl pushes a big-skulled baby
in a pale bluish vinyl stroller in the cross-hatching of a park fence
where the seats of swings are hanging broken,
and the monkey bars are out of reach.
Will you ever know that baby?
Will you recognize it, say if you should meet in twenty years?
Your drowning mouth is now pulsing, swollen with grief.

At Strathfield, a woman, calcified and loose-skinned
in a grubby brown coat carrying
a square plastic basket full of cheap but True magazines
apologizes into your carriage.
She is the sort who will tell you how her husband died
twenty years ago to the day and her
no doubt puffy forty-five year old son
is severely depressed for the third time and her granddaughter Sharon
has disappeared without a trace.

You turn back toward the window,
hoping she will sit somewhere else.
The carriage lights flicker three times and stay on.
The dark streets, the draughty flats disappear.
You see your own yellow face in the glass.
It gives off cold and your breath
condenses in kidney shapes from your lungs.