Most poems about travel sell us the horizon. Dave Bonta's "Travel Anxiety" begins by admitting that horizon is exactly what he would like: "If travel were just / the open road, I might / take to it." The conditional "if" is a small confession. The speaker isn't against movement or adventure, only against everything that has attached itself to them. What follows is a catalogue of grievances, and the poem's central idea is that the real journey is the queue, the checkpoint, and the long stretch of waiting. Modern travel has swallowed the freedom it was meant to deliver.
The construction does most of the persuading. The opening lines are short and tidy, with line breaks that let the reader breathe. Then comes "this labored labyrinth," where the repeated *l* sound makes the phrase itself sound laborious, and "this intestinal clench." That second image moves the anxiety out of the head and into the gut, so the dread of travelling is felt as a physical tightening. After that the poem abandons its neat lines. One enormous line pours out with no commas at all: "visas tickets security screenings long lines wrong seats bad restrooms too much luggage…" The missing punctuation is the point. We read it breathlessly, with no pause to catch up, just as a nervous traveller's worries run together at three in the morning. The labyrinth the speaker complains about is, in a sense, the line we are reading, which twists and doubles back and offers no exit.
The list rewards a slow reading, because it changes as it goes. It starts with bureaucratic things (visas, tickets, screenings, no-fly lists), then drifts into bodily discomfort (cramped legroom, recirculated air, soreness). Around the middle it tips into states of mind: "boredom soreness limbo purgatory sleepless wondering." "Limbo" and "purgatory" are borrowed from religion, and they turn an airport delay into something close to a spiritual ordeal, a place of suspended judgment. The humour is dry, but the words suggest real unease. Small sound-echoes hold the list together, such as "long lines, wrong seats," where the near-rhyme makes the complaints click like a ticking clock. There is no regular rhyme or metre elsewhere, and the poem is better without them, since a tidy pattern would work against the mess it describes.
The grammar shifts too. The poem opens with "I," but once the anxiety takes hold it becomes "we" and "us": "will they let us in turn us back demand proof of our identity." The question is left without a question mark, so it runs on into the next worry, and every verb has an authority ("they") as its subject and the travellers as its helpless object: *let, turn back, demand, confiscate, make*. The speaker is no longer a person journeying but someone being processed.
The strangest phrase is "confiscate our umbilical cords." Judging by the imagery, there are several ways to read it. It might nod to the cables travellers carry, taken away at a security desk, but the word "umbilical" reaches for something far older. It suggests being cut off from home, from the source that feeds us, and it hints that the fear of being "turned back" is really the fear of not belonging anywhere. A great deal of feeling is packed into those four words.
Then comes the line that gives the poem its sting: "make us wait wait wait wait." The repetition drags and doesn't speed up, so we feel the dullness of waiting even as we read about it. The final line, "wherever we are bound," is short and quiet after all that noise, and the word "bound" does two jobs. It means *headed for*, but it also means *tied up*, which is how everyone in the poem has been treated. The destination hardly matters, because the anxiety is the same wherever we are going.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few lines. It is funny, recognisable, and a little sad, and its form acts out the experience it describes. A reader who has ever stood in a slow line with a boarding pass gripped in one hand will know exactly what that "intestinal clench" feels like.