Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Poetry at Work: The Poetry of the Commute



With the exception of a very few months in 2000, when I worked from home, my working career has had the daily bookends of a commute. It was as short as a mile, when I had an office in the little downtown section of our St. Louis suburb, and as long as 15 miles, when we lived in Houston and commuted from a northwest suburb to our jobs in downtown.

A commute of a mile is like a haiku, short and over before it began. A commute of 15 miles in bumper-to-bumper traffic in Houston was like driving Homer’s Odyssey twice a day, complete with sirens, a Cyclops, and – once – a martial dispute that ended up as a shoot-out on the freeway. And like the Odyssey, we spent so much time and effort trying to find a way – any way – home.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Scott Meltzer via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

No comments: