Conjoined twins underground
Have you seen the conjoined twins
On London’s Underground?
Heads attached at the top
One identical elongated pate
Blurring into the next?
Maybe you are like the twins:
You take the tube into London’s centre
Every day.
You’ve seen them then,
And you are one too (or two, really).
You’ll know the curved plexiglass window
Separating light train from dark passage —
Long smooth panes that make the tube a tube —
Extruding people through the tunnels
To emerge as newly rendered industrial forms.
You might have seen how those windows
Stretch heads until they become two:
One facing downwards into a device or
A tabloid (The gown! The groom’s grimace!),
One sliding upwards into another self.
That second self is always along for the ride
On its own journey of extrusion
Pulling and stretching, decoupling and rejoining
Like all good morning reflections
Until the separation of birth, “Alight here for…”
