Underground Submarine

This morning like every morning, I was fumbling around in my ritual: keys, wallet, phone, birthday card to Dawn, and my Netflix, and drop off my rent check to my landlord. OK, Get metro card out, so as not to go fishing for it while train is pulling up. I drop of rent check, deposit 2 pieces of mail into mail box, and head for the subway, hear train screeching into my station, run downstairs fish for Metro card, no Metro card, not in front pocket of bag or main compartment, nor in my jeans pocket, ugh mailed my Metro card. Fuck, the day I pull up with an F train running and I don’t have my card, need to purchase one, still have time, old man had notifies me that neither of the 2 Metro card machines are accepting cash or credit, but if I give him $2.00 he’ll swipe his card for me. Awesome, a scammer the moment I need him. I make the train and we thank each other.

poem "on the train"

Transport me, transfer me
Serrendiposuly, lovingly
In this vessel, this silver submarine
Sleepy and serene
With out an exterior scene
We are forced to look with in
With those we share this 60 feet tin
A temporary place with our urban kin

United we stand
United we claim our place in this 20 minute space

Us lucky ones sit

Unyielding
Colors in dream
redeem a seat or a lean on the door


Now 10 hours later, on the way back home. poem "Back on the train"

Ladies and gentlemen
I’m hungry
A dollar
A nickel, a penny, anything would help
Maybe a piece of fruit
And if you are feeling up to it, a hug

Heads shift up out of habit
But then retire back to their book
An outcry of averting eyes

Same ol song and dance
For some, this F train
has been their performance space
for years

No woman, no cry no woman no cry
I remember whenna we used to it…

In between, fade out of public speeches and unwelcomed entertainment
The remainder of us sit, unfazed or at least sport a mask of sub-emotion
Fade back in, and become the clinking, the clattering of the train amid a fog of conversations in Spanish, Yiddish, Brooklynish

“Delancey, East Broadway next stop”

Trains escorts us along
Paranoia, of my fellow, intimately situated stranger
reading my most private of thoughts
I look up to determine that he is quite submerged in his own reading
My narcissism, such self-importance to assume this stranger is just aching to share in even just a glimpse of my profanity on paper

A palette of fluorescent light and mundane hues, not too foreign from the office I just escaped
We ride this familiar interior for minutes and more a day
strangers to one another
we are the pole holders, or the lucky few who are the seat dwellers
we are each other, we are new Yorkers.