Poetry is an Accident on the Freeway

Poetry is an accident on the freeway

Poetry is frustration

A dreadful inconvenience

An obstacle that prevents you

From getting where you want to go

As fast as you expect to get there

An interruption to your regularly scheduled programming

A careless intervention

Into your carefully structured life

Your blissful reverie broken

Your mobility halted or slowed

Forced to tail the bumper of the car in front

Forced to gaze upon someone else’s destruction

Forced to share in a collision

Poetry is a journey delayed

Poetry is personal invasion

The worst and the best at once

An opportunity to consider life and death

An invitation to think about someone else

A chance to step outside yourself

Or to think about yourself from another’s perspective

Or to feel another’s pain

Or to stop and help

Or not

Poetry is waiting

Poetry is witness

There are others seeing the same scene

But they are irrelevant because

The experience of the accident is your own

You interpret it as you were, are, and will be

For no one comes from the same place

And everyone is headed some place different

And all have varying expectations

On how quickly they should get there

United by stoppage alone

And if you actually stopped at an accident

An image would be etched in your mind

But stopping would delay you further

For an accident prompts questions of bother

Why is the traffic stopping?

How dare this delay?

What is everyone looking at?

How did it happen?

Why can’t people be more careful?

Was there injury or death?

Whose fault was it anyways?

What are the stories of the parties involved?

As their fates have been inadvertently intertwined

But the questions fade once the accident is in the rear view mirror

After all now you’re past and can resume normal speed

Finally on your way to where you’re supposed to be

A wave of relief washes over as traffic flows

Speeding down the endless pavement of your consciousness

Comments

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