Deflated

Sometimes while driving to work,
I forget where I'm going.
I forget there is traffic—
other cars filled with people
haunted by their discarded dreams.

I let the music on the radio
wrap itself around me,
let it sing a lullaby of forgetting.

And I float.

I float away from my practical car
which gets great mileage
but never a second look.

I float above office buildings
filled with grey cubicles and fluorescent lights
that make everything look like cheap items for sale.
I float over piles of paper and overwhelming apathy.

I float above dirty streets
filled with the detritus of hamster wheel lives—
wrappers coated in grease and regret,
straws sticky with commercialism and soda.
Newspapers which tell of skyrocketing student debt,
tax increases, and countless scandals
involving power grabbing politicians
or greedy millionaires who will get off easy
because money is a skeleton key.

I float above traffic lights
which are always telling me to slow down!
stop! it's not your turn!
when all I want to do is go go go...

I float and I float and I float
until the balloon is popped
by the sound of the horn
from the impatient driver behind me.
We're all in hurry to go nowhere.

Lisa Lerma Weber lives in San Diego. Her work has appeared in Brave Voices, Green Light Lit, Headline Poetry, The Failure Baler, Vamp Cat and others. Follow her on Twitter @LisaLermaWeber