Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Enough of making blumindy wait for it; I found myself awake and decided to have a whack at editing this poem. But the edit turned into a complete rewrite.

A late night driving poem

Dry pavement, clear weather, sparse traffic, wee hours, my
Right ankle trembles and wants to push harder.
Holiday weekend with increased enforcement, a
Ticket's too risky so pick up the hammer.
Wide road with lots of lanes, moon on smooth asphalt, the
Cruise control set a mere nickel past legal;

(Patience, patience, patience, patience)

White lines which normally flit past my eyeballs now
Trickle past mocking my leisurely travel.
A mile every minute feels slow to this child of the
Late second half of the twentieth Cent'ry.
Surrounded by metal with rubber beneath me and
Fire before me propelling me forward,

(Patience, patience, patience, patience)

Rolling along with an eye to the shoulders
A mere fourteen times my height forward per second;
Itching to fly so much faster than this on these
Four lanes a side of nice, smooth macadam,
Knowing that half again faster I'd still not be
Pressing the limits of car or of driver.

(Patience, patience, patience, patience)

Holiday weekend with troopers aplenty and
Goodness alone knows who else is about --
Heed the advice from the telly and slow it down,
Schedules are flexible, there is no hurry --
Controlling impatience and setting the cruise control
Calmly proceeding to my destination.

The germ of that came to me while I was driving south on I-95 between the Baltimore and Washington beltways; not, perhaps, as dead-straight a stretch as the poem implies, but there are long enough straight sections, and the curves are quite gentle. ( It started out more like this... )

I still need to get around to writing about recently-read books in more detail and adding them to my books page on my web site, but I did want to say this before I forget: I found 1634: The Galileo Affair, by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis, to be much more of a nail-biter than 1632 or 1633, despite the presence of life-and-death battle scenes in 1633. The tension in 1634 is drawn out over a longer span. I was disappointed not to see some of the characters I really wanted to, but in the afterword Flint mentions that other novels set in the same universe and same year will deal with those characters. *whew*

(Thank you, thette. I enjoyed it as much as you thought I would.)

"If there were a religion that worshiped The Muse, that would be the one you'd belong to." -- snarkyman, to siderea, 2004-01-29