The Dark Road Ahead
It was just before daybreak
1971 when I pretended to sleep
so that my father would carry me
to the back seat of our Galaxy
I looked up through the window
to read the signs for the last time
"Turnpike" & "Howard Johnson's"
Stew's gas station, never to be seen
again, growing smaller, smaller
still, and then gone entirely.
I can't remember Stew's face
but I remember his missing
fingers and the chewing gum
The sun rose in a new state
and as the years wore on
I always wondered if it were
a dream, one day waking to
find that I was still three years
old, yearning to aggravate my
brother with a frog in my pocket
but the waking never came
and many days passed before
I dismissed the notion entirely
frowning on the sunset, looking
at the dark road ahead.
1971 when I pretended to sleep
so that my father would carry me
to the back seat of our Galaxy
I looked up through the window
to read the signs for the last time
"Turnpike" & "Howard Johnson's"
Stew's gas station, never to be seen
again, growing smaller, smaller
still, and then gone entirely.
I can't remember Stew's face
but I remember his missing
fingers and the chewing gum
The sun rose in a new state
and as the years wore on
I always wondered if it were
a dream, one day waking to
find that I was still three years
old, yearning to aggravate my
brother with a frog in my pocket
but the waking never came
and many days passed before
I dismissed the notion entirely
frowning on the sunset, looking
at the dark road ahead.
posted by Armand @ 11:23 PM
1 Comments:
At 12:52 PM,
Anonymous said…
I remember that day, too. We went to sleep in rural North Carolina, and awoke inside the Beltway, never to see a lightening bug again. Now I use a protein from them to make mouse cells glow....
Somehow, the words of Bob Seger (Whom I find to be FAR more of a poet than he's given credit for) come to mind:
>Twenty years now
>Where'd they go?
>Twenty years
>I don't know
>I sit and I wonder sometimes
>Where they've gone
>Sometimes late at night
>When I'm bathed in the firelight
>The moon comes callin' a ghostly white
>And I recall
>I recall....
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