Clockwork Orange

I love it before the train arrives.
That first shove of tunnel breath coming up the escalator, warm iron, wet stone, old coin, brake dust, the city’s armpit kept under glass.
Down there Glasgow takes off its face.
Ticket gates click like beetles. Tiles shine with municipal spit. A gust comes blunt from the platform and puts both hands on you.
1896 is still in the walls.
Victorian knuckles, river mud, men cutting a circle under the city so the living could orbit themselves without ever seeing the sky.
Inner Circle.
Outer Circle.
Two orange thoughts running opposite ways round the same buried skull.
Partick to St Enoch, Buchanan Street to Bridge Street, Kelvinbridge, Hillhead, Govan, names passing like damp cards through a machine mouth.
The smell is not one thing.
Tar in its black coat. Earth breathing through concrete. Water sitting where it should not. Metal rubbed thin by going. Human heat. Old electricity. A sweetness almost rotten, almost motherly.
You step down and the tunnel closes round you like a bad idea you missed.

Love and kisses going around in circles
Lovely, though.
That’s the shame of it.
Decay can hold you kindly. Damp can feel like being kept. The wind from a train lifts the hair at your neck and the body remembers cave mouths, animal dark, shelter with something else inside it.
At West Street, they say a grey woman keeps herself unfinished.
Hillhead has its pretty dead.
Shields Road mutters in the pipes.
Maybe nonsense.
Maybe every underground makes ghosts out of timing, platform gaps, a sob travelling ahead of the train, a shoe scuff behind you when nobody came down the stairs.
Orange carriage. Small windows. Faces floating in the black.
Above, the city sells coffee, argues about rent, checks its phone, pretends to be daylight.
Below, the old loop keeps turning.
No destination, really.
Round again.
A bright little intestine under Glasgow, taking us in, passing us on, giving us back with tunnel smell in our coats, ancient sitting happy in the lungs.