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Victor D Lopez
a book bubble about
Of Pain and Ecstacy
Literature & Fiction
Author Insight
The Subway
This poem was written about the same time as my poem Central Park and continues a theme one reviewer termed urban loathing, though not without cause. I attended Brooklyn Technical High School. Fulton Street was the stop on the old GG line that connected Brooklyn and Queens. The station was dank, dingy, and always smelled of urine. Descent into the station, especially after hours, was a sort of heroic trek into the bowels of hell with no Virgil as guide or guarantee of ever re-emerging. Even in the daylight hours marauding gangs of teens from other schools or neighborhoods roamed the GG train mugging hapless passengers. Technites with our leather 18" slide rulers and expensive HP scientific calculators that cost upwards of $140 in mid-1970s dollars were easy targets. The non air conditioned trains were seemingly held together only by their dozens of coats of graffiti and were as hot as an Inquisition's "cleansing fires" in early fall and late spring and the station was as cold as a naked human standing next to Satan at the very center of the ninth circle of Dante's hell during the winter months. Not a context to engender warm and fuzzy feelings.
Book Excerpt
Of Pain and Ecstacy
The Subway
I stand alone in the dark Fulton Street subway station, Breathing in the urine-scented air,
Breathing out clouds of steam,
A subway train rushes along,
Not stopping,
Biting at my eardrums,
With the painful percussion,
Of thousands of people,
Silently screaming,
I don’t want to see,
I don’t want to see,
I don’t want to see,
The air fanned by each subway car,
Rushes against me,
Pushes the ozone and the smell of burnt brake linings, Into my nostrils,
Along with the air,
Sucked through the iron gratings,
Along miles of Brooklyn sidewalks,
Carrying the odor of a prostitute’s festering sores, And the cries of a hungry, fatherless child in dirty diapers, And the hoarse moaning of a city councilman mentoring a young intern, And the cheap perfume of a fourteen year-old runaway, Turning $20 tricks in an alley,
Smelling of stale Chinese food and wet dogs,
And . . .
I don’t want to see,
I don’t want to see,
I don’t want to see,
. . . the smell of spoiled cabbage soup,
And the rancid remains of a hotdog buried in sourkraut, And putrid lilies lying in a gutter,
All assaulting me, forcing me backwards,
Until my back presses against, The grimy once-white tiles,
That coldly burn their graffiti on my spine:
God is dead,
Bake a kike,
Whitey sucks,
Kill the niggers,
I don’t want to see,
I don’t want to see,
I don’t want to see,
The train finally passes,
Its lights receding into the dank,
Dark tunnel beyond the platform,
The screeches and screams slowly die out,
Their echoes sucking behind them,
The smell,
Of my,
Warm
Vomit.
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