I’m sitting in a traffic snarl
with no ticket for anywhere but home.
My little house, the carpenter gothic one,
no suitcase or passport,
left in my car, the only escape,
A/C, the radio and the phone.
Outward bound,
I wish I was anywhere
but the Beltway,
in my microcar.
The sound system’s great,
and I can even see that patch of green
beyond my right tweeter.
An endless stream are my nights
on the couch, e-zines on the tablet,
delivery through my phone.
I long to go to places
where humanity is still a trace
where every face is Friday.
Outward bound,
I wish I was outward bound,
Haiti or Tahiti, Nome or Travelocity Gnome,
the mangoes are fresh,
and no one speaks English.
There something new lies in wait for me.
Tonight I will dream of other lands
while scaling imaginary hills on a gym machine.
All my dreams of being weightless
will come back to me in utter hilarity
when I stare upon the scale.
I need someone to excite me.
I wish I was airborne,
hurtling 400 miles per hour,
over endless sunlit seas
freed from the screens, traffic,
and ringing in my ears.
Immortal, imperfect, circular interstate
This is the taste of eternity
in an Appian way.
All roads lead to Laredo, friends!
Steel guardrails rusted,
Twisted like the untrusted
or the back of an anaconda,
Braddock’s trail, perhaps.
Natives of every persuasion
punt barges on this congealed La Brea tar pit,
trapped by amber warning lights,
Red-eyed, corpulent as a priest
who tends to a flock of Grubhub minibike drivers.
Seatbelt way,
Appian way,
Belgian blocks are strewn
between leaves of grass,
chained exits, and big red X’s.
No passing without authorization
Or the purple E-Z pass!
Natives in painted faces now sit behind windows,
lips as red as the Golden Gate Bridge,
fires gyre in almost every car
except for a few e-ones
with choking executives swooning e-cigs
meeting on the wireless.
Speaking of wireless:
a horde of female Olympic sports bras go by and bye,
the kind that won the gold medal in soccer,
and then the male sports bras appear so blah.
Yes! You are on the dry American Ganges!
You are on a bark surveying Vesuvius
as it crackles and sparks
throwing marble pillars and concrete blocks
with equanimity through the stratosphere!
Step up and buy a ticket right here under the cobra light!
The fences are going up, up, up!
They are made of repurposed Chipotle restaurant décor!
Here, a countertop, there —
that held a waste can–
and there: something which was a wall.
I love fake rusticated block panels brambled with ivy
curling on them like a hungry python.
Yes, this is home, home, home, not Rome.
No twins were suckled by ethically-treated hyenas on a hill
while making frozen locust bean curd on a stick.
No herds of herd heads like Herder or heifer,
growing from a moat of monoclonal antibodies,
tended by robotic dogs while the cranberries mate.
This is home, this way, this asphalt tract,
lined with parallel dotted lines going to eternity,
created by a pencil on onion skin paper
to mark the fringe of an atom bomb’s blast.