A handful of hipsters from Dayton, Ohio (don’t laugh)
have full-shirt tattoos of famous traffic jams:
Lagos, Mexico City, Moscow, Joburg…
with authentic makes, models and choke points.

It can take all day for a Lada to make it from hip to wrist,
the driver fuming and pissing in a bottle,
and one motorbike just off Tverskaya
has never made it off its rib.

I went looking for the artist who did all that ink,
but some other dude was renting his chair,
his dealer was angry—out a hundred bucks—
and his trailer had burned to the ground.

Meanwhile, in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur,
a handful of wanna-be thugs
are sporting idealized Pan-American Highways,
just before dawn, empty of cars.

_{Hat tip to Fela Kuti and Jack Womack.}

_{Source image CC-BY-SA by Mark Fischer}