The Subway

Your tiled walls, covered with dirt and stains from exhaust and nicotine, surrounding an entire world, your own, in a cocoon of old posters and violin cases opened to coins. Your floor, worn into slightly lighter shades of Standard Issue Blue, thrums with the sound of your children racing down the rails. In the corners lie trash from donuts, candy and coffee, bought at another station 5 minutes down the green line. At night you watch the passengers, you consciousness is more tangible than it is in daylight, so much so that some turn and glance behind them as hairs stand up on their necks.

Some days you make up a future for the girl whose tiny hand is pressed to one of you gum- adorned pillars. Sometimes you try to make the electric tail less appealing to those who have the haunted look you have come to recognize from the stains on your tracks.

You are alive, to those who live within you, alive as any of us, and they have grown to recognize your hot breath from that of other stations as you breathe out a sigh ahead of rushing steel and light.