On the New York City Subway

They say it is here that one can feel the world come to them and meet it halfway, that you can walk among giants and be as tall as they are. This is the city that ambition built and its dream lives on in a million coke dealers crack heads, Wall Street masters-of-the-universe and street-side panhandlers, Chinese Immigrants and Russian Mobsters, mothers of four struggling-to-make-ends-meet, Sikh cabbies, bus boys, bellhops, fourth-gen Wops, dirty cops and veterans of a Harlem Renaissance. For all of them America is a dream in a place name - two words, for which after two centuries of existence the first still means as much now as it ever did. The possibilities are ceaseless, just like the city itself: living, always humming, never sleeping, never pausing. All present grobble before the sheer kinesthesia of it all, humble. Here the gods are real. Walking is a kind of prayer, as you whip out the cell phone, the brief case, some others a basketball - a million people, somehow walking, creating rhythm with their Jordans, flip-flops, All-Stars and Italian loafers, together in a chaos that only God could understand. Walking in a pace.

Walking: a democratic experience. Immortality will only reach a few of the ones who pass through here but until then all are equal under the City's gaze. And on the Subway, all ambitions are at once silenced. The quiet sitters remain that way, and only the panhandlers speak: preaching to the quiet masses who sit there and take it if only because they have nowhere else to run. Here, in the tunnels even the shirtless African man can be king again when he passes into the car sometime between this stop and the next. He yells, coming close to mastering the rhythms of the City with his voice, the churning sound of the clicks in the beat as the Subway's steel wheels pass over breaks in the track, yelling over it, between it, within its sound: it is his drum. "Ladies and Gentlemen!" he yells his story out. Closer to hell than he is to heaven, the man finds some solace in the fact that for once they can't deny him. The space they share is all there's: this, moving, repeating blur of the City's soul. This, interchangeable component of the industrial age. The underground train, the silver bullet with it's blue collared pilot sitting at the forefront on nothing but a whim. He works to the City's schedule, a prophet of its will. He doesn't care for your own timetable, your own beat; here there's only one that matters. The City's beat is for no one to claim their own. The clicking sounds of the train passing through its elongated caves is only the sound of something much greater pondering and it cares nothing for your own worldly considerations. Clicking sounds, to match the steps, to match the thoughts of millions. But all's quiet if you listen close enough. In between the footsteps, the patter patter and sounds of doors opening, closing, repeating. The yearning calls of refugees of their own lost cause, "yearning to breath free..." Some silence looms there, still, a meager peace amidst the chaos that never ceases. White heat. The peace of those humble before that which is greater than them: the prayer returned, breathing life into the citizen millions. Here the dream lives on.