A fellow poet and faculty member at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston sent me a poem, and I decided to share it with you.  It is a cautionary tale for all you TYPE A types. Cynthia Duda, a native Tennessean, has lived and worked in the Boston area since 1976.  Her work has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Poetpourri, and The Comstock Review among others.

At the Foot of a Slope

The noise began when he entered the ramp
onto 95, Nine Inch Nails cranking
“Head Like a Hole,” the weekend awaiting
his life ever after with the uber sea
change a-coming from 800 square feet
of linoleum squalor to 24 hundred
with water views and a concierge parking
his B’mer or Benz or Escalade, something
roomy to drive down the Cape on a balmy
spring morning when beaches beckoned
and the women waited…for the clanging
to stop. It must be the track, so he pulled
his Impala onto the highway, advancing
into “Heresy,” not that he needed
any industrial pumping, only
twenty miles left to closing a deal
bigger than Facebook and California,
but the clanging was now pounding. He snapped
off the Nails; the system was breaking
apart into a rhythmic kind of thumping
as if a tire were going flat at 83 mph
in the inside lane, so he gripped the wheel
to maneuver across rush hour
to break down in peace and quiet, call
ahead to delay the meeting—he’d pop
that spare on in under 10—but the thumping
had moved to the base of his thumbs, the pain
so loud he could hear his mother wringing
her hands, gnarled by arthritis.
But he was only thirty-one, too young
for that, too young for a stroke or heart
attack though the throbbing in his chest
began pulsing in his temples and throat
until the beads of his sweat rolled to a stop
at the foot of a slope beyond the asphalt.

– Cynthia Duda

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