Nowhere Land Poem by Robert Rorabeck

There are roads in this country—
Great, long byways that stretch all the way across.
On them you can spill one sea into the other—
Upon them, ribboned in concrete and tar,
All the day’s sunlight flickers and bakes.
These roads leap across chasms then burrow into the earth.
They curl back and forth upon one another, join and stitch
And cross—
They are the avenues of great commerce
And anything is possible— They bleed people and ideas
Together, and before you know it everybody is a neighbor—
Upon them, the barriers of the earth are defeated and laid low—
The ancient becomes primordial, the future the present—
A few minutes and you’re there, laying down in that sweet
Destination, making love to a new plot of sodden ground
As you listen to the cars speed by—

With our great highways space has become a singularity—
The lines of movement go by so quickly, and destinations have
Melded into one another like the seepage of a rampaging dream—
Here, populations of towns spill along the road, congregate and queue into
The other—They become identical and boarders no longer
Have hope of meaning. Billboards raise their ill-shapen heads
Like cubist premadonnas lifting their skirts in long chorus lines,
The lazy flirts hoping that you’ll
Buy what they sell, and the franchises of their masters pockmark
The once sleepy burgs which before had risen their beautiful
Heads, disinfected from anything but their own simple purpose
For that day—

Towns are smaller versions of cities, and cities are burgeoning
Metropolises—Going into them is like traveling down the mouth of
Python you’ve been in before— You know the names of things
It has swallowed, because they are all here festering in the concrete gut works
Like great pyramids of similar symbols and color patterns….

The roads have brought the addictive infection.
With the speed of modernity, the have flattened the soul of this
Nation, and splaying open the dream they have copied it
Again and again, so that the original vision has become muted
And dulled, a dissected canvas mirrored by viral plagiarists,
The cancerous commerce, and instead of our roads taking us anywhere,
Instead, we find ourselves manacled to an inescapable spot
Disfiguring the greatest beauty the sun once shone upon.
The roads have made us prisoners to our capitalism,
And driving down we are put on the assembly line of our bloated franchise.