Right on Red - Feb 15 2024

 

Right on Red

Feb 15 2024

Where are they all off to

and coming from?

Emerging

from the vanishing point

as if they can’t leave fast enough,

while others head for it

in roughly equal numbers.

A zero sum game

of inexhaustible cars.

As if the traffic cancels out,

and everyone

might have just as well

stayed put.

But who ever does?

So day after day

funnelling in

to the city grid

and grinding to a crawl.

Intersections grid-locked.

Arterials

clogged like clotted blood.

SUVs

idling in sclerotic lines

choking in exhaust.

Apoplectic drivers,

raising hands

to flash the bird

up against the glass;

scofflaws turning right-on-red

fuming at pedestrians

taking too much time to cross.

The romance of the open road

— roof down

wind in your hair

tunes turned up full blast —

is more myth than real.

And why bother heading west

to the promised land

following the sun?

Not when the frontier is dead,

California's full.

No one imagined

start/stop traffic

stuck behind the wheel.

That the open road

would be impassible,

parking an ordeal.

Or that the machine

that was supposed to liberate us

has become a 2 ton anchor

of tinted glass

and rusting steel.

No more free-wheeling thoroughfares.

No expressways

freeways

Autobahns.

No pedal-to-the-metal

on flat straight stretches

through prairie fields

desert scrub.

Just pot-holes and traffic jams,

and going nowhere fast.