WordsOut poems by Godfrey
Rust | collection BREAKING
THE CHAINS
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The man who got on at Ealing
The man
who got on at
Ealing
talks
to strangers. He says
Meaning is
a function of a discourse situation.
The
leg of his spectacles
is held in place with Sellotape.
He knew a
mathematician called
Reifenberg,
or was it
Reisenberg? The name
was lost in the
tunnel's
din;
in any case
he's dead now, poor chap,
fell off a
mountain in the Dolomites,
but
he could drop his prejudices
instantly, like the man who got on at Ealing
seeking a
mathematical foundation
for
language, his manuscript
sitting in a stranger's lap,
about to drop a
bombshell
on an unsuspecting world
before
the man
who got on at
Ealing Broadway
gets
off.
A more or less factual account
of an encounter observed on the Central Line in August 1982.