ATTENTION POETS! Finding it hard to market your work? Are the rejection letters from The New Yorker and Poetry Northwest forming a discouraging pile on your desk? Do vanity publishers charge too much?

Fortunately there’s a solution to getting your verse into the public eye—in fact, there’s a guaranteed means of ensuring its placement right between the ads for ITT Tech and Metro Employee of the Month posters. Every day, tens of thousands of tired commuters pile into their seats and turn their weary eyes upward for the inspiration you can provide! That’s right, we’re talking about the Metro Transit Poetry Bus Project, established in 1992, and now a proven way of finding grateful readers for your iambs, your trochees, your quatrains and couplets.

And it’s oh-so-simple! Each year Metro sponsors an official poetry competition, with its Spring 2000 competition soon to begin! Winners will be proud to see at least one of their finely wrought works on every bus in the fleet! (Sixty special buses are devoted solely to poetry.)

Below, some samples of my own entries in the imminent competition, which—all modesty aside—are sure to triumph in that contest. (Don’t be discouraged if you can’t match their individual brilliance—there’s always next year, and another bus to catch.)

Sonnet No. 43

Shall I compare thee to a Metro bus? Thou art more lovely and more oft on time At movies, plays, and many various Occasions when, ’tis true, the sun did climb Well past the designated date when I, In shame, did make you wait near endlessly Because my Volvo’s clutch had gone awry, And forced reliance on the Forty-Three, Which by circuitous route left me lost, Alone, adrift, forlorn, and somewhere south Of Yelm, but short of what a new fare cost! Where cruel driver said with smirking mouth, May ye this lesson learn (too late, alas!), That timely love requires a monthly pass.

Unfinished fragment

I wandered lonely as a bus That stops on routes diversified, When all at once I saw a fuss, A host, amassed by Park & Ride. One asked a lift downtown to work. Replied I: Get your own car, jerk!

Selected haikus

isn’t this my stop, so familiar and yet so unwelcoming?

can i sit down please, or would you rather keep all those seats to yourself?

please don’t sit down here, take another seat, homeless man smelling of urine

could we move slower, I mean, what is the problem with this friggin’ bus?

stop with the cell phone already, or must we hear more about your ex?

are you passed out, pal, or sleeping on all those seats with your plastic bags?

please keep on eating, don’t mind us passengers whom you shower with crumbs

long dark bus tunnel, passageway to the retail core where I may not shop!

hey, driver, I think we might’ve hit a cyclist, or maybe a dog

hey, that’s my hand there that you’re sitting on, clumsy, with your big fat ass

why did no one say this express bus didn’t stop until Burien?

sadness without change far beyond the Ride-Free Zone, and me with large bills

hey, creepy old guy, move your hand off my leg or i’ll call the cops

hey, that’s no guide dog, and you’re sure not blind, but say, does your pit bull bite?