I want this to be about you, 
But it's not

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.