I recently spent the week in Chicago while my Dad was in the hospital for major surgery. Travelling back and forth from the hospital involved going about 110 blocks on two busses, from the north end of downtown to the south end of downtown. Depending on the time of day and how long I had to wait for the busses, this trip took between one hour and 15 minutes and 2 hours and 15 minutes. Riding the bus is a great way to observe the life of commuters and just plain folks in Chicago. I wrote most of this poem while riding the bus. Enjoy!
Chicago Transit Authority and Me – 147 to 4
Workers
Shoppers
Students
Students of life
Ride the bus
Make it a double!
The daily double
An express
Oh, to the heart of civilization
Such congested arteries art
A tact rendering society’s very core
Any falling short
In efficiency
Made up
Even odds
Run over by effectiveness
Pilings of people
Towering foundations
Things looking up
People looking down
In a windy city
Going bussed
Reaching a critical mass
Together experiencing the unspeakable
Connected somewhere else
Razing dreams
Of brighter palms
Too due lists
Play lists
Songs sung by someone else
Left only wanting
More Gigs
Beating the hum drum
“I pod people”
“I pod people”
Over and over
Over and out
Still
Now
Faster tablets
The magna carta of a new millennium
An ever-expanding tabula rasa
Living on
Cloud nein
Mean wile
The poor stare into their cells
The porous of all
A remnant grasps
To trees gone by
Scrawled by the prints of modernity
Pulp
Fiction
Yesterday’s news
Tomorrow’s prognostications
Today’s storyteller
Only lessor is
Standing still to arrive
The man clutching only to his bar
Drinking in
His river
As life passes by
Close enough to touch
Surrounded by a stream of cars
Never the same twice
Day after day
Some for hire
Some already bought and sold
Thankful to have a job
Washing windows in the rain
Making umbrellas while it suns
Trafficking in
The city
Flashy lights tell us what to do
And what not to do
Saying when
Hoping to get off
Before it is too late
Surveying
A single bird
Twittering
Nothing to see here
Don’t flip out
Dreading a park
Backs to the shoreline
Fending off the source
From still waters
Of a nameless state
Well
Beyond the horizon
Sales trimmed
Passed what you can’t afford
Not too due
Drive on, fare people!
Fear not what you miss
For there comes an other
Echoing in eternity
Dozens of stories
To be tolled
Countless more
To be ridden
Far too many
On a shelf
A mobile library
Where audience and author
Miss unparalleled appointments
I’s that seldom meet
Idle business
Wasted time for sum
A riders’ workshop for others
So many blocks
So few children to play with
Un-no-ing
Silently groan up
Wonting to be scene
Not herd
With plenty of space to ponder
Who is passing who?
Encyclical roll reversals
At times
Like
A living museum
Enriching the observer
In the presents
Of the seeming mortified
Weather paying a tension or not
Life will take you places
Each doing the bus they can
Out look
Fare to excellent
Many more waiting
On the streets
To be
Or not to be
Full, filled
Contracting countless riders
From ashes to ashes
From dust to dust
Only to return to where we came from
It’s enough to make won
A little loopy
Accept to know
That one
Awe ready
Has arrived
