Escape

My lunch hour walks through the city park

Past city scenes,
I move in widening strides.
The clock ticks;
My time is short.

I dash across busy streets
With mere seconds left on the walk sign.
My office will beckon too soon,
But not just yet.

Past rivers of traffic
And the rhythm of urban existence,
Down the overgrown and crumbling stairs
I enter a world of forest music and dappled light
Reaching through a curtain of green.

Cement gives way to worn dirt.
Runner, walkers, lunch-time strollers like myself
Populate this alternate universe,
Rabbit holes and worm holes and all.

A world strange with nameless birds
And wafts of honeysuckle in the air.
Save the muted backdrop of motors and sirens and beeping horns
The transport is complete.

Thoreau and Frost could find solace here.

Time closes in too soon.
I turn back to horns and sirens,
Motors and cement.
But the escape has been achieved.

And back in my office
The improbable, impossible waft of honeysuckle
Belies the hum of copy machines
And click of fingers against keyboards.