Gridlock

City planners love thoroughfares, bridges,
dream of controlled streams, ordered footfalls;
humans moving from point to point unhindered.
Traders—the street kind—see human traffic

as opportunity. The sides of thoroughfares, virgin
ground for setting up stalls; traps to harvest
the shift of eyes, walls of goods to dam the flow
of the fevered. Paths contract like cooked greens,

hotspots spreading along lanes beneath the cool
skies of the imagined metropolis. This is the story
of pilgrims stopping to worship totems of commerce,
running late to the assembly of perfect souls; this

dance of movers and dawdlers is what holds cities
in gridlock. In the tension, lovers stop to admire baubles,
hold up the loveless, the working, the rushing hordes: us
in the grip of passion, delaying what we might become.