This podcast featured my reading one of my early poems from my Of Pain and Ecstasy: Collected Poems first poetry collection. It is perhaps my darkest poem, which one which one reviewer accurately termed urban fear and loathing. Alas, the subway station in the late 1970s was as described, and descending into it after hours was not unlike a descent into hell without the warning to "abandon all hope ye who enter here"  or the benefit of Dante's Vergil as a guide. Gangs of marauding thugs ran through the old GG trains even during rush hour mugging Technites for their expensive calculators and slide rulers (yes, we had to use those back in the mid-1970s), watches, wallets and whatever else they could carry and move on to the next subway car in the days when moving between cars was still possible. It soon became a metaphor for me for life in a city that had lost its way and perhaps its soul, if ever it possessed one, and allowed crime, grime and political ineptitude to flourish unchecked.