A subway at night is a strange place to be alone, because it is built for crowds. "Train" starts from that contradiction. It opens with a question, "Was it lonesome riding the subway line / through the night?", and then spends most of its short length piling up reasons the ride might feel threatening. Its closing lines turn the whole journey into a comparison: "Youth changing course / Squealing violently as a train changing station." The poem seems to be less about transport than about the anxious, bodily, noisy experience of growing up, a time when you are moving fast and don't control the route.
The first stanza is built from questions and fragments, and the speaker addresses a "you" rather than themselves. The questions ask about dangers rather than answering them: "Fear of the tunnel collapse," then "Did the signal impedance / Make your surroundings confounding?" The vocabulary is cold and technical. "Signal impedance" belongs to a manual, not to a feeling, and the poem's grammar seems to bend around it, since "impedance" is a noun made to behave like a verb. That awkwardness fits the content. The passenger cannot make sense of the surroundings, and the sentence cannot quite make sense of itself. The sound of "surroundings confounding" repeats the same heavy syllables, as if the thought were circling.
Then the train accelerates, and so does the imagery. "You realized you were alone as the train sped / Fleeting through traffic-less trails" is the poem's moment of recognition. The emptiness is spelled out in "traffic-less," and the alliteration of *f*, *t* and *tr* gives the line a clipped, rattling pace. The next line is the most striking: "The tunnels a spike and the hills they Impale." The poem turns the usual picture upside down. We normally think of a train passing under a hill, but here the tunnel is a weapon and the landscape is its victim. The capital *I* in "Impale" makes the word stand out, almost like a jolt. The line has no verb for the tunnels, only a noun phrase, so the violence arrives without any stated cause or agent.
The poem's biggest shift comes with "I feel / Vibration / Cramps / Nausea." Two things change at once. The "you" becomes "I," so the speaker stops describing a distant passenger and admits to being the one on the train. The earlier past tense ("Was it," "You realized") also gives way to a present-tense "feel," as though the memory has caught up with the speaker. The form carries the meaning. One word to a line makes a list that drops downward, each word a separate lurch, and the move from vibration to cramps to nausea shows the body slowly losing patience with the motion. These are physical details rather than emotional ones, and the poem lets them stand without explanation. Nothing here is named as fear, but the symptoms say it.
The last two lines are where the poem gathers its meaning. "Youth changing course" has no verb for the main idea, and it reads like a headline or a diagnosis. "Squealing violently as a train changing station" then supplies the sound the poem has been missing. Brakes squeal on rails, but the word also suggests a cry, perhaps even an adolescent voice cracking, which makes the comparison work in both directions. Judging by the imagery, "changing station" suggests a pause between one stage and another, and that moment is loud and uncomfortable rather than graceful.
There is no regular rhyme or steady metre here. Lines run long, then snap short, and most carry little punctuation. That looseness suits a poem about a ride with no smooth stretches, though it also means some phrasing feels rough or unresolved. What makes "Train" worth reading is its compression. In under twenty lines it takes a familiar urban setting and fills it with dread, sickness and noise, and it ends on a bold comparison that asks us to hear youth as something mechanical, loud and hard to stop.