"The Metro"

    I refuse to walk yellow lines between competing directions, contradicting sides that push my feet into the middle of their ongoing argument. I ride the orange, the red, the blue and the green instead. I board speeding cars with sucking doors that purge and swallow people repeatedly: swaying thin-skinned metal bodices passing one another in an unwavering directional dance.  If you know the stops, you can never get lost, each one leads to the next, and a line coexists with any other at various points.
    I sit. I watch.
    Nervous balls of people, jumping at stops, each individual the only one going somewhere important. For them, there are no other trains making their stops, there is no other route to get where they�re going.
    Hand rails feign dance partners for children, twirling and spinning them, releasing their bodies, letting them topple and bump into bloodshot businessmen who edge away, glaring and grunting.
    So many lifestyles have never been in close quarters with one-another: the poor, the young, the old, the rich, the mediocre, the artist, the tourist, the punk, the fag. They all sit, stand, exit and enter.
    They are all the same.
    I ride. I stare out the window, playing games with my eyes by concentrating on one object for as long as possible before it leaves my line of vision. I imagine myself jumping from the waterfalls of rust that cascade down concrete barriers, and wonder how graffiti artists were able to reach such unreachable places to bless them with their bubbles of language.
    I have played out my untimely demise while traveling, imagining the million ways, the million reasons, for the train to lose its tracks. I have felt myself thrown through the double paned window that my head was leaning against a moment before, having a handrail wrap itself around my body, or impale my chest. Suffice to say, it hasn't happened.
    I am the only passenger. I ride until the car goes out of service, back, forth, around, beneath, switching to a different car the moment mine goes to rest its wheels. I ride, no matter which direction or destination.
    The map of my life is a transit codex, backlit by a 40 watt light bulb, and you can find it beneath twenty tunnels, within forty rail road cars, and atop hill climbing escalators. It is blue, red, orange, and green, but never yellow.