Parking Foreplay Poem by gershon hepner

When you try to find a space,
to park your car you must engage
in parking foreplay, and not race,
intimidating with road rage
the other drivers on the block—
Be patient, as in bed you are,
opportunities will knock!
There’ll be places for your car
other than the one you’ve just
lost to another driver—not a pig,
just somebody who shares your lust
for parking spaces that are big
enough for what you’re driving. Think,
as I have said, of foreplay, till
you find, like Pyramus, the chink
that gives you and your car a thrill.

I recommend you feed the meter.
It’s little fun to get a ticket,
and costs less than to park your peter
for rendez-vous in which you’re wicked.
Since parking foreplay is less fun,
don’t cut the corners as you wouldn’t
when parking peters, where you run
high risks by doing what you shouldn’t.

Inspired by Mary Roach’s review of “Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What it Tells Us About Ourselves) ” by Tom Vanderbilt (“Slow Moving Vehicle, ” NYT Book Review,8/10/08:

Even without home furnishings to distract us, we rarely seem to get anywhere fast at any time of day. One reason, Vanderbilt reports, is that people are driving to do things they once did at home or down the block. “It is not just that American households have more cars, ” he writes, “it is that they are finding new places to take them.” They’re going someplace to eat. They’re driving to Whole Foods because they don’t like the produce at their neighborhood supermarket. They’re going out to get coffee. (So much of Starbucks’s revenue now comes from drive-through lanes that the company will put stores across the street from each other, sparing drivers “the agony of having to make a left turn during rush hour.”) And they’re parking. Or trying to. In a study of one 15-block area near U.C.L.A., cars were logging, on an average day,3,600 miles in pursuit of a place to park. It’s not only the number of parkers on the roads that slows things down. It’s the way they drive, crawling along, sitting and waiting and engaging in other irritating examples of what one expert calls “parking foreplay.” The answer? Sorry: more expensive street parking to encourage the circling hordes to use pay lots.


8/1/08