The freeway's everywhere: it never sleeps;
clearing a
six-lane boulevard in one great stride,
leaping the
surface world of streets and lives,
a giant footprint
superimposed.
Take a wrong
turning here, you’re lost:
block follows
block, a labyrinth of shades:
at its heart,
a roar,
a bougainvillea-splashed
embankment:
the beast is on the other side,
secret,
kinetic, inevitable.
Approaching it, the
humanoid plays god,
crossing a
continent unconsciously,
accepting
cities we will never know,
landscapes
that make us a stranger.
When angels
tire of waiting they abandon place,
take to the
freeways.
Without the gift
of flight, you're nothing here,
a fragment in
some windshield gaze, a speck.
Prometheus
gave fire, but man dreamt up the wheel.
Only through
flight can we placate desire.
The bridge in the distance, is a blur
with traffic flowing in a phantom
stream:
headlamps and tail-lights, sparks from
cars,
the apparition of some monster truck
decked out in stars.
A vacant on-ramp
takes an age to walk:
white shield
on green, ‘Hollywood Freeway. South,’
The other
side, its fatal echo, red:
‘Wrong Way. Do not Enter.’
Above torn skies,
a brash Pacific moon;
below, an underpass:
a listening chamber -
grime on its
columns, trash, graffiti scars -
eavesdropping
on America.
