from The Philadelphia Inquirer
December 28, 2001
A free-for-all ends at A.C. Airport
"The airport parking lot was known as a free-for-all where tow trucks routinely had to sort out the handiwork...
cars parked at all angles,...often with no discernible ingress and egress."
New Jersey is the greatest poem never written.
Not an accident, but constant accidental.
Parking space is the central fact to man born in America.
There are several hundred ways not to understand.
Despite the invitation to excess, in A.C.
no bets are placed on the stay-at-home team, Pomona Nomads.
Directions: 1.) Park and lock your car 2.) Fly to Florida for the winter
3.) Remember,there's little reason to think New Jersey when you're not
there--even if that's where you parked.
Fluxus is the name of the vapors coming off the cinder fields
meeting the black birds as they come in at night.
Before the war, getting a good spot
was what most Americans considered warfare.
The forward function is a maneuver
all novice tow truck drivers like to do for you.
Your delight in pattern and repetition is dropped off
to search a dusty field filled with hundreds of towed cars.
Until you actually say it, unscriptability and New Jersey rhyme.
The State's equilibrium is located elsewhere.
The car alarm. The unison HONK. The techno field jam.
The songs Bruce Springsteen will not write anymore.
By Thomas Devaney
Thomas Devaney is program coordinator at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of: The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999).