Behind The Wheel: A Trucker's Poetry Book
by Charles B Reynolds
Smashwords Edition
© Copyright 2011 by Charles B Reynolds
Smashwords
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Introduction
I've had many careers and interests throughout my life. One of the most virulent activities which has occupied my time has been keeping busy and trying not to be bored with life. Of the many different job careers I have had was driving a truck for a number of years. I've driven OTR (Over The Road) and hauled containers for a regional container company. One thing I can tell you, is that driving four, five, six hundred miles a day can make your mind go a little "boggy." I've listened to music, talk radio, the news and books on tape to relieve the boredom and mind numbing madness of the thumpity thump of tires over asphalt.
I decided to put one of my other interests to good use. I took pictures while I traveled. This was pretty cool. Then I decided maybe I would incorporate another fondness of mine, writing. I pondered story ideas of detective truckers, truckers in science fiction settings and truckers that ran the government behind the scenes. Nothing really jumped out at me on that regard. Yet. But then I thought of poetry.
Help Me! I'm Poetry Challenged!
I don't know much about poetry. I have been writing prose since 1977 and music lyrics for just as long. But every time I have had a class or been in a discussion with writer friends, I just seem to be "poetry challenged."
I never really contemplated the whole of poetry. Nor did I realize, until one time I decided to delve into it, that there is a huge catalogue to poetry, There are terms, of course, such as "cinquain" and "iambic pentameter." As far as my dull poem-wit can fathom, the latter is where a line of poetry has five sets of up and down speech. The first syllable is unstressed, the second is stressed. The third syllable is unstressed, the fourth is stressed. And it goes on from there.
But there are also scores of different types of poetry as well. For example, most of us have heard of the Haiku and the Epic. But have you ever heard of the Tanka? This is a Japanese poem that consists of 31 syllables, broken down by lines as five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables, seven and seven. Or could you possibly be familiar with the Terza Rima? No, you say? Well, Dante was credited with creating it (Divine Comedy), and it was used by the likes of Chaucer (Complaint to His Lady), Frost (Acquainted With The Night) and Shelley (Ode To The West Wind). I can't even go into what constitutes a Terza Rima without my mind going into some Escher spin. Something about interlocking rhymes in iambic tercets. (Groan!)
All these terms and forms and variations and so forth can make a person go a bit loony. So how is it that there are literally dozens (okay, maybe a bit more than that) of poets running around with very little formal training? Don't they know that if they are going to write poetry, they need to spend years and years in classes and learn all kinds of different ways to write out their art?
I mean, how can they determine if what they write is any good? If they don't know the rules, how can they abide by them? How can they possibly have an intelligent discussion about the terms and forms and tercets and epithalamium and all the other geegaws that surround the world of poetry critiques?
But really, I wonder to myself (a sure sign that I am either crazy or a writer), did Chaucer know the specific technical aspects of what he was doing? Did Dante sit there and say "okay, now how many syllables was that?"
Maybe poetry is not about this. Maybe it is not about the technical aspect of the ratio between up and down, stressed and unstressed, rhyming and non-rhyming. Maybe it is not about how well one can discuss a poem or critique one. Maybe it is about the art.
Hmmmmm, maybe poetry is about if you like it or not. It just might be about how the poem makes us feel or think or react. Could it be that poetry is about reaching out and inside another human being, and laying the poet's gentle finger on some pulse or nerve? Could it be about getting a reaction? Or maybe it is just about the personal expression of the poet, and the rest of the world be damned.
I may be poetry challenged, and I may not be able to have deep discussions on the merit of a particular poem or poet. But when it comes to poetry, I guess I just know what I like. When I read a poem, if it makes that deep down inside connection and makes me want to laugh or cry or think or just write, than I like it.
Well, just to be perverse, I decided (after losing my mind spinning through books and websites while researching poetry) to make up my own form of poem. I used this format when I wrote Ohio Barn. (Actually, I wrote the poem first, but let us not quibble semantics.) You are more than welcome to use it yourself, or critique it and tell me all the things I did wrong. (Laugh)
You start out with eight lines as an exposition of the topic at hand. Lines one, two, three, five, six and seven all have nine syllables. Lines four and eight have seven and the last word rhymes. In each set of four lines, you have action, description, action and the rhyming word. (The sample layout below may be a better explanation.)
The second set of eight lines is for the introspection of the topic. Gaining some sort of insight into yourself, the subject or the world in general. Again the action, description, action, rhyme sequence is observed.
The final set of eight lines is for the conclusion of the poem; be it a revelation that came from the introspection or just a moving on. Again the sequence is observed.
Exposition
9
syllables - action
9 syllables - description
9 syllables -
action
7 syllables - rhyming word
9
syllables - action
9 syllables - description
9 syllables -
action
7 syllables - rhyming word
Introspection
9
syllables - action
9 syllables - description
9 syllables -
action
7 syllables - rhyming word
9
syllables - action
9 syllables - description
9 syllables -
action
7 syllables - rhyming word
Conclusion
9
syllables - action
9 syllables - description
9 syllables -
action
7 syllables - rhyming word
9
syllables - action
9 syllables - description
9 syllables -
action
7 syllables - rhyming word
That all having been said, I have decided to bundle a bunch of poems together with pictures. Some poems I wrote that were inspired by the pictures (such as the aforementioned Ohio Barn and Wisconsin), others poems I wrote and then looked at pictures I took to match them with. And a few I wrote as dedication and used other pictures I had (such as with the poems for my dad, "A Father's Love Revealed" and "for him"). I decided to share them, something for drivers and non-drivers to read. And to share some of the deeper thoughts drivers have with a world that might not think they have them. I hope you do enjoy reading them as much as I have in putting this together.
Charles
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Despair
Kinsella: An Inspiration
Patience Please
Haiku: The Poet, Chicken Soup, Joint Hands Communicate
Ode to Secretaries 1999
In That Moment (She Took it Away)
These Are My Fingers
Ohio Barn
Wisconsin
Melting Pot
Breakdown
Lathes
Requiem for an Addict
Selfishly My Love
Lest We Not Forget
Windy: A Political Limerick
Remember, You Cad
'Neath The Bed
Still
And The Silence is Deafening
Keep Telling Me
Another
A Father's Love Revealed
Knight No More
1-800-Don't-Call-Me
The Life
Rambling Roads
for him
The Rubicon Humored
The Forgotten Tale of the Santa Domina
a sonnet called “yo”
Poem Walls Unbound
Portrait
Me and Eeyore had many a conversation. He didn't have much to say, but he was a great listener.
Despair
Your
life is good, your path is clear,
Laughter sounds from year to
year.
Not picture perfect, never so,
But not so bad, as life
will go.
Calamity, disaster strikes,
Your world is flipped,
beset by spikes.
You find yourself left hanging there,
Feet
left dangling midair.
The ledge outside, your world
within,
Your fingers grasp an edge too thin.
You call out hope,
you cry in vain,
And barely see the closed glass pane.
Try
as you might your purchase slips,
Hardscrabble rips cross
fingertips.
You cry out in pain, for help to hear,
You find
inside both rage and fear.
You hear the scrape, the window
creak,
Your hopes lift up, you hear them speak,
Such awesome
words, hushed with care,
"Thanks for hanging in there."
Your
heart it pounds, you pulse has raced,
Soon your missteps will be
retraced.
Before much more your life resumed,
Silly now had
panic consumed.
Seconds, minutes, hours, days,
Time is
passing in a haze.
Your fingers grip you rearrange,
You find
this delay quite strange.
Up beyond the sill you peer,
And
no longer see it open here.
From deep inside you hear the
sounds,
Of happy lives off walls rebounds.
Your fingers
gray and melt and blend,
Where sill begins and fingers end.
The
sky outside is cold austere,
Raindrops slide into released
tear.
From time to time the sounds inside,
Drift outside
and cannot hide,
From ears exposed to frigid air,
"Thanks
for hanging in there."
Inside the world spins slowly
on,
Outside your senses almost gone.
You wait, you sigh, you
breath, you cry,
What else is there except to die.
You
offer up a silent prayer,
"Thanks for hanging in
there."
Hope is something you cannot dare,
"Thanks
for hanging in there."
You're filled inside with deep
despair,
"Thanks for hanging in there."
You close
your eyes, embrace the numb,
The end, you're sure, soon must
come.
"Thanks for hanging in . . . "
Sunsets
and dusk on the road.
Kinsella:
An Inspiration
I heard the news
today.
Oh boy.
Well, not really news,
But it was NPR.
They
said a poet was
Going to be on,
I nearly turned it off,
But
listened anyway.
John, it seems, is quite famous,
I thought
he'd be stuffy,
I thought he'd be boring.
Instead, he was an
Aussie.
In an instant flash,
I go back,
To much younger
days.
In Brisbane.
In Hobart.
In Whyallah and
Geraldton.
Our Aussie
cousins,
I might presume to say,
Are what I could imagine
us,
In more youthful day.
They play rough,
Work
rough,
Take life as it comes.
I could have moved there.
I
sigh as the memory fades.
John comes on.
He is
funny,
He is quick,
The interviewer must keep up.
Too late,
John leaves him in the dust.
The jokes are funny,
The
stories too.
Then John reads "Bogged"
He laments
and sympathizes,
With a truck
Stuck
In the mud.
Bogged
down.
From front and side and back and top.
Bogged
down.
Stuck.
Its amazing.
Its funny.
Its so simple
and yet complex.
Its life,
Only as an Aussie can tell it.
Then
he says of another he wrote,
About being bit by a poisonous
spider.
He rushes in to write the tale,
His words begin to slip
and slide,
As he describes,
What it is like.
"John,"
his wife laments,
"You really must get to hospital."
"Yes,
yes," he quips,
"Soon as I get this wri . . . 
Waiting to be unloaded is one of the most boring times for a truck driver.
Patience
Please
The road slips past
beneath by night,
The thrum of rolling rubber lulls me,
The
darkness calls my mind to slumber,
My eyes snap open, alert once
more.
When shifts are done and home I go,
The boys'
attentions grab my spirit,
Fed and dressed and off to school,
Only
then can I fall and rest and snore.
When once more
consciousness returns,
The boys return I must assure,
Time for
play and fifty questions,
Then off I slip to grind the
road.
Sometime between the road and zzz's,
In between a
moment and the next,
I read my friends' new words on screen,
This
place where all their ideas abode.
And now and then my own
ideas,
Must find release from inside my mind,
With quick
torrents rush they flow,
But far too often, unwritten, slip
away.
To all, I have fallen far behind,
Your words I want
to read, and yet,
I will, I will, the desire is in me,
But
when? I know not hour or day.
I ask a boon of patient
kindness,
And understanding of my plight,
Words to me are
passions burning,
As a drowning man needs drink to nourish.
Cast
me not adrift, I'll flounder,
Take not from me your wondrous
words,
Allow me time to read and gather,
Your gifts, your
words, allow thought to flourish.
Thank you all!