Steven Kent

At the DMV
 
A teen walks out a driver — time to fly!
His mother looks perplexed, and somewhat wary,
As hordes of us wait hours beneath the eye
Of one old half-blind county functionary.

The seats are badly worn; the parking's poor;
The workers here are not what you'd call "striving,"
And still we queue up daily by the score,
Then sit and watch more stressed-out souls arriving.

How long before I'm forced to come again?
Did I fill out each form, or did I miss one?
If Dante could have seen a Circle Ten,
It might have looked an awful lot like this one.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside (www.kentburnside.com). His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, The Dirigible Balloon, The Hypertexts, Light, Lighten Up Online, The Lyric, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, The Pierian, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collections I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) (2023) and Home at Last (2025) are published by Kelsay Books.