"gameboys" poems
The children would be packed and ready days in advance.
At first, we packed for them, but as the years passed,
They were experts at rolling clothes for twice the space,
Using laundry baskets rather than luggage tripled our carriage.
We'd leave early Saturday morning, almost night,
Departing from the Ontario weather like a bad odour.
Kathleen was away at school.
Mags and Andrea were in their teens now.
Ten years of March madness was terminating.
Herself would sit shotgun with Triptik and thermos.
The kids would awaken south of the Ohio,
Hungry, grumpy, and eager.
She had it all planned out.
Crosswords, colouring, wordfinds, books, Gameboys, lace,
Sandwiches, juice boxes, treats of all sorts,
For another twenty hours on the road.
I invariably imagined our Mini in the return lane
As we crossed the Bluewater Bridge into Michigan;
Trip over, kids exhausted, us, quiet, subdued,
Just wanting our own bed.
But twenty hours on the I-75 lay ahead,
Turn left at Knoxville
For Myrtle Beach, sun, tennis, seafood,
Separation.
I found no peace in our final escape.
Conversation with her had halted.
A round-trip of dialogue in my head.
She'd said, I bought a house.
Words wrapped like an egg-salad sandwich.
It was our March break.
Mar 10, 2017
Mar 10, 2017 at 10:38 AM UTC
Robert Ardrey posed the question for the ages
When he offered up his treatise on rats in cages.
As space recedes, said he, the pace of life leaves us no
Time to breathe, crowds in, forces us to cross against
The yellow to red light, doesn’t wait nor hesitate.
While the breath of fresh air becomes the fetid exhale,
Heat, the result of speed,
Expands each encounter’s
Press
Sure as a cavein cuts off
Light
Turns day into night, begins the claustrophobic’s fright.
Crushed against each other, each instant seems longer and so the
Press
Sure grows – We move – Race against
The red light or even more (maddeningly)
Cruise through it at the end of the line obdurately refusing to look left or Right.
You know this truth even as you sit in denial waiting for the last car to
Hurtle
Past and the cars behind you begin their honking cry
All ready to race to where the next lights lie. And even each recognition of this act of speed compressing,
Instead of giving us peace,
Becomes another form of the press
Sure to push us even faster.
Ever closer to the edge that’s despair. Consumed, subsumed . . .
Our terror turning ist.
And meanwhile, there it is blinking, the cursor light winking,
With it’s only eye – telling us
That it’s Pentium (TM) process can take us there,
Race us there out into inner space,
Our gameboys palmpiloted.
Our implanted synapses
Imploding at Warp 8.
Which seems great, until
We realize like the Star Trekkers we so wish we were
That that is the speed at which our universe begins to disintegrate,
Begins to un relate.
And only Super (the person that is) man can reverse our fate,
Can retract the boarding gate,
Can reinvent the late great time when we all had a little SPACE . . .
Feb 17, 2014
Feb 17, 2014 at 11:39 AM UTC