I see the Centaur when I
.drawkcab seye ym nruT
But that starts to hurt
And I bump things:

Chairs and stoves
begin to wander
Into my shin--
Bruises sprout green.

"Don't look for demi

Gods when you drive

Inner view mirrors

Won't keep you alive

--Burma Shave"

The last five lines are in the American folk haiku form invented early in the 20th Century by some advertising genius for the Burma Shave company. In this form, road signs every quarter mile or so on a lonely highway feed you one line each... so you have time.... to... think. The form consists of a wry, rhymed quatrain, but it isn't perceived that way; instead, there's a cryptic sign, and for fifteen seconds you wonder. Sign two tips you off; you think back and link it to the first line. By then the third comes up and you spend the next fifteen seconds guessing the punch line. Last comes the company's signature, as if it were a person--a poet. The beauty of the form is that the commerciality is a quarter mile away from the poem and the only link between them is in the viewer's mind--yet it's more effective than a mile-long billboard, without spoiling the scenery. Only a few Burma Shave road haiku survive today, on lonely rural highways.

But they're worth remembering, as a formal precursor to the Net. Half the art was in the links. Only instead of a vast, intricate, expensive network of computers, the linking mechanism was (depending, as Einstein pointed out, on whether you're at rest or in motion, and how long you've been in motion) simply space...

or time...

or boredom.

All of which is just a distraction from my real issue here. Is tuning into your Center (or centaur), your Greater Self, really so different from jabbering on a cellphone while you drive around oblivious? I find that turning my eyes inwards leads to bruised shins, or even what others (bruised) see as outright sins. It's one reason I do dreamwork--sleep's a safer time to explore inward. You won't crash your bed into a lamppost! At least not often.

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