Evening skies trickle out the tailpipes of the cars navigating freeways
Painting the air in deepening hues of curiosity made color

What if I just keep driving?
How far will I make it?

Night slips in the back door, as Day exits the front
I can not see beyond a hundred feet
I do not remember the next curve of road
I am not sure where I am going

But do I need to be?

Autumn coolly glides on the coat tails of whistled winds and trees shedding summer coats
She says she doesn't like peanut butter
Unaware of the basket of PB&J lying on the table
Does she change colors too?

Tombstones tell tall tales if you know how to listen
Stories marked by the ignorance of 'death is not here for me yet'
Billboards of birth and final breath
Anything exists in the hyphen
The too long but never long enough pause before the end

And
in silence,
I take my leave.

At the back of the stage in a gloomy wee room
Where the cockroaches eat what the rats don’t consume
There’s a table enveloped in paper and grime
On a carpet now lost to a happier time
With a cast iron typewriter, rusted with age
In the gloomy wee room at the back of the stage

And under a lampshade of nicotine brown
Sits a comical legend of zero renown
How he plugs at the keys of his rattling beast
The years of persistence have left him decreased
Now he’s stuck in the shade of his hovering doom
At the back of the stage in a gloomy wee room

His words are for others and too, the applause
Though a standing ovation might cause him to pause
He hasn’t the courage to speak them aloud
For he’s lacking the bottle and shy of a crowd
So he captures the laughter in lines on his page
In a gloomy wee room at the back of the stage