Benevolence

Sorry about the lack of new material lately -- class assignments have become slower, and the last few poems have been icky, personal things I don't want to subject you to. But I do have something new today -- I wrote this two weeks ago, in a twenty-minute exercise. It's the Lloyd Expressway. ;)

(By the way, this should be on USI's creative writing department website by the end of the week, under Best of the Workshops for April. http://www.usi.edu/libarts/english/creative.asp Exciting!)



Benevolence



You have seen them, in their old white
Neons and bulging Caravans, throttling past you
And throwing Cheerios or Ke$ha on your windshield.

You have fought them where the highway squeezes
Itself around men in orange with Plexiglas heads, where the fast
Lane is elbowed into yours twenty yards after the stoplight.

You have waited nicely
While they pitch forward, wiggling past and then rolling
Back into your bumper, tapping the brake righteously:

Their child is on the honor roll. They must obey the speed limit.
And you have thought, haven’t you,
Of tooling beside them cheerfully instead,

Window to window, and waving
Them into the fluorescent barrels, listening
For the crunch of axle on humpbacked median.

Perhaps you would stop and hold their hands afterwards,
Let them use your phone, and you should –
They are the golden retrievers of the world,

So firmly assured in the inherent goodness of man
That they don’t check the mirrors before sliding in front of you;
They leave the windows down and sing loudly like children.

So you sit at the stoplight, singsonging I can’t see you
Because they’ve plastered two hands over their eyes,
Or throwing the tennis ball again and again, and smiling.