401 Rush Renee Cronley

Poem title: 401 Rush
Poet name: Renee Cronley
Poem: traffic jams along information highways
fester in their own exhaust fumes
agitate air currents and open the sky
to spew syntactical torrents 
for seeing different patterns in the clouds

collecting into VIP knowledge pools
that claim to have all the minerals 
for a developing sedimentary mind

the heat of pressurized thoughts
weeps into maturing gray matter
making a mouth of stalagmites and stalactites 
ready to bite anything 
not solidified into their hard palates

these congested narrow streets
leave no room for Freudian slips
silver tongues snake the pubescent psyche
and spit them out of the painted lines 

they land at the edge of the nearby bridge
too mangled from the inside 
to brave the roads they were othered off of

their escape is disguised as a jump
a free fall of thoughts
an innocent rorschach splatter
left open to interpretation
End of poem.
Credits and bio: Copyright © Renee Cronley
First published in Wayward & Upward: Stories & Poems (November 2022) with Off Topic Publishing. 3rd Place in Delta Literary Arts Society (DLAS) 2023 Poetry Contest. 
Renee Cronley is a writer and nurse from Manitoba. She studied Psychology and English at Brandon University, and Nursing at Assiniboine Community College. Her work appears in Chestnut Review, PRISM international, Off Topic Publishing, Love Letters to Poe, Weird Little Worlds, ParABnormal Magazine, Black Spot Books, and several other anthologies and literary magazines.