Ken Jones

Tram Fever

A male heaven
in a neat diagram
the tram route map

Just off Eurostar, in the morning of the world. I sit in an Antwerp pavement café. Here, at the centre of the map, the thickly bundled colored strands. They lead out to the bold single ones which run off the edge of the map to unimaginable places.

At some of the stops, like "Kolonel Silvertop" and "Joe English" (between "Stenenbrug" and "Morckhova") I shall never alight, for fear of blighting my imagination. I remember Brussels, where you can get on at "Liverpool" and off at "Birmingham" only a few blocks away. But what about poor old "Simpson", dangerously close to the bilingual "Bombstraat / Rue de l'Obus"? here in the Groenplaats, in the heart of Antwerp:

At the terminus
a metallic jostle
of squeals and groans