Road to Omaha
-------------------
For once it is evening as I drive to Omaha.
I have avoided the usual morning rush,
When the cars are too close, the drivers too harried,
And the usual late night darkness,
When my own headlight becomes the limit of my existence.
For the last year, almost daily,
I have taken this road
To earn a livelihood ?
A livelihood scarcely earned at sanity?s expense.
This four-lane highway is the same,
With the old railway lines on the side,
The buggies immobile as always
- They never seem to move; I can never tell if they are the same ones ?
The Powerball billboard with millions fluctuating daily like petty change,
The white paint on green signboard
That marks the exits and the distances.
The air is so humid
That the wind rushing through my rolled-down-windows,
Slaps my cheek, in hot ballasts.
It feels like water guns spewing dense, hot soup.
The lighted streetlights are useless because the sun has not died yet.
They have opened a new McDonalds nearby ?
The sign says so.
In the last year ? the months and days,
When I followed the snow patrol vehicles in irritation,
When the College World Series crowd jammed the roads,
When I barely escaped the police check,
And other equally insignificant days with quiet, fleeting excitements,
I felt that I always missed my exits.
The green signs were artistic representations of nihilism ?
Rorschach cards of sorts ?
The absurd images conjured by the colluding highways bent,
On administering a cruel and involuntary psychoanalysis on me.
I knew I was forever condemned to take those beguiling exits
Just to be brought back to the familiar four lanes,
Beside quiet rail lines and the rusty, sedentary buggies
And that old engine that never whistled in my presence.
I wished that roads were like railroad tracks,
The directions would be so easy-
Go Straight. And Go Straight. And Go Straight?
But this evening being the way it is,
The different sun as gentle as it is in its still brandishing glow,
This road becoming as familiar as it has,
And my mind being not as cloudy as it used to,
I suddenly hit on a thought:
I belong here. I have already arrived.
---
mG. 08-03-2005
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