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Gatwick airport

Gatwick airport glows at night like a bee-hive; its bright golden facade promises honey. In Farringdon Road I laid my head on a concrete pillow my back turned to the world, My mouth full of dirt.

Across the railway track, in the distance, Wren’s dome lifts its head amid encroaching glass conformity. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and form rose out of chaos.

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Two policeman stand with me in the doorway; their hands on my legs and body are efficient but are not kind.

Driving home to London from Chichester, the approaching trees emerging out of blackness in the undipped headlights, knowing at last what Eliot really meant, my hands seemed to belong to some desperate terminal patient, longed to wrench the wheel from the skillful reasonable hands, to smash the car against the bland kind beckoning trees. Home to me now is cessation of feeling; to have done with shivering, with despairing, with sheer endlessness; not to need, or want, or desire; only to cease.

There was a day when the sun shone, when the sky was blue: then a wind, carrying clouds, ruffled the empty grass slope to a different colour; in the moving shadows at my feet lay a drowned fledgling, bony and fragile, its feathers still wet with the night’s rain.

Gatwick airport at night grows bright as a bee-hive Tonight fog has shut it down.

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