My once-per-week poem post for National Poetry Month:

Go West

Sometimes you know
when you’re in the wrong place
at the wrong time
other times it’s only clear in hindsight

there is no catalyst for the wisdom of time

on the road you’re never out of place;
you’re always moving,
–going some place.
here I am
rolling along the highway in North Carolina
the heartbeat of the road beneath me
and I’m staring at a Hawaiian license plate
just as out of place and time
as when I sat beneath the shade of palm trees in Paris

Did you know if you enter Honolulu in your GPS
it will take fourteen days and twenty hours from Raleigh?
When you arrive in Los Angeles it says
“start to paddle.”

Go west
and grab an oar.

This poem appears in both This is Paris and Bare Feet on the Dashboard. It was also published in 2011’s Best of the Raleigh Reading Series.

This fall will mark my 5-year anniversary of moving from Long Island to Raleigh. Since I moved down here I have seen 4 different cars with license plates from Hawaii.

I think there’s a hidden tunnel.