It resides in the hours That I spent wide awake When I couldn't sleep so I smoked And I couldn't dream so I wrote What I hoped I'd see
For the metaphors I couldn't keep churning out So I smoked some more And I spurted out Lines about lines
For the driver on the dented highway With the window cracked To feel the chills of the air blowing past Listening to Bob Dylan tell her The person she was supposed to be but Never was And never will
I want this to tell you how I feel, But it won't
And if she drives far enough she'll reach that Looming exit The one she knows she must take Back to the life she's sick of living But fights through the pain For the same reasons that I Fight through, because I want to meet a pretty girl With great vocabulary, And a smile like Rita Heyworth
I'm still looking for that girl To drive me across that highway And recycle old Dylan lines As if they were personal dictums She had synthesized herself And we can freewheel this road together
See I'll never be that great poet that Three hundred and twenty-nine thousand people Have watched on the Internet And that is a comfort
Because the truth resists simplicity And in my heart of hearts I am a simple man And telling the truth through words in meter Or in stanzas Will never come as naturally to me As it does to Dylan But in my acceptance of my ignorance I become more powerful Than I'd ever need to be Poetic.
So if writing is always my hobby And never my workhorse If I can self-satisfy through Strict stanzas that I will Seldom share If it is only to a girl Driving on a highway Singing songs about formerly-modern America that I Recite these rehearsed thoughts of mine Than I will have succeeded
Because my career will have been love And maybe I can write this About you. And then, and only then, it will be.
Again, years old. But different. I wrote this... almost like people write in their diary. The Genesis of the Queen. The day I knew I was a poet.