Lines On Queues

Circumstances favor us or not,
it makes no difference how we view them.
We stand in queues all day, no matter what;
we spend our whole lives getting through them.

PO, market, bank, Security,
inescapable, the severable heads
of some mythological monstrosity
whose divine assignment is to bore us dead.

But there’s something nautical about
Passport Control, the blue changeless shift
of a glaring, bureaucratic sea of doubt
where we are left in our tiny boats to drift,

lost mariners, becalmed in queues
that lead only to the ends of new ones,
graying slowly as cretaceous clerks refuse
our slack yellow sheets, send us for blue ones.

Finally, our documents accepted and approved,
we simply fall up from the shrinking fleet
on wings too exquisitely tuned to move,
our leaden commerce with the world complete.