Don't It Always Seem To Go?

[As people I know are finally forced into choices a long time coming, now's the time to foist something that spewed out of me one early summer morning while staring at a ceiling fan halfway around the world...]

BIG YELLOW FREEWAY
In this blasted, beautiful yellow wood
If only it were simply two roads that diverged
It would be easy to say whether I
Took the "one" less traveled by

Unfortunately or not
On palimpsests of roads
Bodies, hearts, minds, and souls simultaneously
Motoring (frantic)
Sauntering (sedate)
Stumbling (drunk)
Clumsy, always at random,

We travel on something like a devilish
multilevel freeway
("My, how this yellow wood has been built up!
Progress!")

(And why yellow? In MGM's spectacle,
amidst a pomp of Munchkins,
I always noticed the other-colored brick roads
Dorothy could have chosen.
And Joni's big taxi's yellow, too.
Frost, Baum, Mitchell – 20th century visionaries
had such a jaundiced view.)

Anyway, I (isn't it the same for you?)
See these roads,
Come upon these junctures, and choose.
Choose? Free will or predestination?
(Oh, not that conversation.)
Two sides of an antique (counterfeit?) coin
(As even daffy Doris Day could sing)
As long as we cannot see whatever will be
It's a distinction without a difference.

There are no huge green signs on
the Yellow Wood Freeway
Each cloverleaf interchange hazily shows
Congested traffic ahead
And if sometimes I take offramps
signed "Less Traveled By – Next Exit – No Services"
The difference made – all, or some,
or none at all – is never immediately clear
And rarely ever satisfies.

-Hydra, June 2003

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