A Road Without Turns

The long stretch of road climbs

banks and hills and mountains and peaks

and drops down

down

down

valleys and bends.

This road coils around suburban edges,

wanders pass long-stretched, flat countryside, dirt-worked farms and fenced-family plots, spying horizon–

sites distant cloudscapes and weather.

Milestones count the stages:

prostrate,

crawling,

walking,

running,

running,

walking,

siting,

prostrate.

But the road never turns.

It started somewhere that no longer exists

and will end at that dreaded time that does not exist yet.

It travels every conceivable place but has no station

– no place of respite, no rest stop for ready to drop, done in traveler.

The road is sometimes paved and travels lightly;

other times, it’s cratered and scared.

But the road never forks or deviates from more than one lane.

There is no shoulder or off ramp or four-way stop.

Invariable one-long-irretraceable-unretractable way.

Determined.

Evermore destructed, constructed, and anticipated.

One moment

and another moment.

On and on, pulled a-way.

Or maybe the road is cast away,

booted from that cradled manger where it started,

heaved and drove elsewhere exiting that sudden spark,

pushed by inertia until it’s boxed and buried

or burned and shelved, dispatched with an urn.