Motorway twitters

A late developer as usual, I have thus far resisted the clamour for me to join Demi Moore and Stephen Fry on Twitter. But I am intrigued by the possibilities this new microblog opens up for gnomic poems on the quotidian. So I’ve done a little poem about motorways, the lines made up of twitters (tweets?) of 140 characters or less. This is the best I could do before I got bored – it’s harder than it looks, you know.

Here I am on the tarmac; it is true it bears no message. But on the road, what material for semiology! (Thank you, Roland Barthes)

I flew over a motorway once. It looked beautiful, bathed in sodium light with the car headlights like stair-rods and the catseyes blinking.

Those catseyes aren’t really there for the cars: they’re stars, shoehorned into rows by some celestial surveyor with an eye for beauty and order.

Before you sneer at that sweaty sales rep in the middle lane, just remember that he too has a soul and a shortage of cup-holders.

The hawks hovering gimlet-eyed above the verges aren’t looking for mice. They’re I-Spy geeks, ticking off the flyovers like trainspotters.

A foil ashtray, a flooded toilet and a plastic-stick tea stirrer. Not even Rilke could make poetry out of a service station.

Love isn’t a bursting heart. It’s the woman in the Esso shop, ringing home to ask if they need any milk and firelighters.

Anyone else like to have a go?