Electric Karma Subway Surfing Blues

“Step in and watch the closing doors!” BING! BONG! If you ever go to New York and ride the subway, go right to the very first car, and it’s going to feel like you are mosh-pit moshing in a warm and friendly ethic rainbow of senior citizen crankyness, “Hey sonny, get the fuck out of my way!” Then, stand with your face just millimeters from the glass of the front window like you’re suspended in space, AH! just a few feet above the tracks...

BRUM! When the train starts the acceleration is incredible, like you are a surfer dropping in on that big wave after the hurricane, WISH-WOO! Shove your toes up against the lip of the front door, like you’re hanging ten and tube riding a giant momentous surfboard, SPLASH! The machinery of the train roars like the thunder of waves pounding into sand, BAM! BAM! like Jake LaMotta vs. Sugar Ray Robinson in Chicago Stadium back in 1951, BAM! “You never got me down Ray!” and you cut through the cosmos on 600-volt motors with the head-rush of an out-of-body experience, ZAP! AH!

Time is expanded. Lights flash by in the tunnel, ZIP! like the souls of animal sacrifices that Plato said would guide the dead to their destiny, AH-WOO! Racing towards what? Heaven? Like Lee Iacocca of the GM Corporation laying off thousands of people to send company profits through the roof? “Greed is good, greed is right, greed works.” Oblivion? Like Lee Iocca getting run over by one of his employees falling asleep driving a GM mini-van? SNORE! SCREECH! SQUISH! Reincarnation? Like Lee Iocca coming back to life as a cockroach, only to be stamped out by one of his ex-employees layed-off on unemployment? SPLAT! All I know is you arrive like screaming birth at the next station, WAH! the same as the last with filthy floors, ZIP! reeking of urine. PISS...AH!

by TJ Richter

© 1995 Theodore J. Richter