Lines Written in a Notebook on a Train journey from Truro to Brighton

I returned from Cornwall to Brighton by train yesterday. I left Truro train station at twilight and arrived at Brighton, met by Em, at about 11:15pm. The following lines were all written at some point on the journey.

Serene at twilight stations. Coffee and a wood pigeon. The strange peace that accompanies the hour before a long journey and there is nothing else to be done. I hear traffic and voices, and the dark fading grey of the sky, and below it all, the deeper sound of quiet.
-written at Truro station

Malvern smoke-ghosts in the hills, pale mist in the spring twilight. From the windows of trains watching the lamp-lit distance pass. The breeze through memories of grass, writing poems over ecstatic night-landscapes. Notebook reflected in the carriage window.
Hallways, a waltz, a house in the comforting country dark. Slow river reflection. Black and white squares. A chessboard floor.
A geography of waiting sentinels. Empty platforms and white station lights. Black hills and and an infinity of streets. With access to the sight of a god, I watch the city arrive. The announcer comes over the tannoy reminds that if I am to alight, to remember all my belongings.
Something about arriving in towns at night. A sense of languorous possibility - a spreading out of a half remembered dream. Night-fragment from childhood, an afternoon fever, bright and cool and ambiguous. If this were Clovelly Heath I were returning to now? Not the city where I lived but its imaginative / imagined counterpart. The city built up over years and memories.
Approaching towns and places I once knew. Reading. 18 years ago tonight, I left Reading for Uxbridge, then by Uxbridge to Bretforton. Langley College echoes. Deep dark December blue. I missed something in that time. An unconsummated mystery. Reach back and there is emptiness where I once stood. An absence in the shape of myself watching. Was she golden? An autumn sunlight of a girl I never saw? That time was full of train stations. Langley to West Drayton. Stood at Langley Station with people I knew and those I didn't. Soemthing absolute about the darkness of those nights. A cold I've rarely known since. Stood at the bus-stop outside college waiting for the yellow 458 to take me home to Uxbridge. Our Price and a ground floor room that seemed a basement room. Sleeping in permanent twilight. A sink and two cupboards. Learning to smoke.
At Reading Station a man holds up a piece of paper waiting for someone to get off our train. As the train pulls away he is still waiting. Another train on another platform arrives. Sudden hope! He went there instead, but soon returned to our platform and watched the train pull away. I watched his face fade into the station.
(-written on the train between Truro and London Paddington

Overheard at Paddington underground:
'He might be a man, but he's definitely a Croatian'
I think I might have misheard.
-written on the Circle Line underground from London Paddington to London Victoria

In December, the whistles blown at stations are cold.
-written on the train between London Victoria and Brighton