Before he came west to attend graduate school, Denver poet Robert Cooperman was a cab driver in his native New York City. 
He hated almost every minute of it and says he despised his dispatcher. "If he didn’t like you, you got a cab with bad brakes, which was basically homicide," Cooperman says. "Or you’d get a cab with terrible shock absorbers. Only the guys that he liked got cabs in summer with air conditioning."
Cooperman has transformed his misery into poetry for the new collection "Just Drive." The final poem in the book is below:
