pause.

My car got too hot, the road got too long,
I needed to get away from old mixed CDs and piles of paperwork,
somewhere 60 miles north of Memphis.

I parked onthe crumbling shoulder,
climbed the incline thorugh the wiast high grass
and nodding summer heavy heads of lazy susans

and seated myself on the rain moist ground.
Kicked off my soft brown boots
passed down from an aunt when I was just a teen

and she was still alive,
flexed my toes in coarse grass,
propped myself on my elbows.

A quick flirty breeze caught my long hair
worked it into tangles over my head,
around my face,

snarled halo lifting and dropping with the wind.
I tilted my face to the bleary October sun
to watch a bright yellow cropduster

swoop over the interstate,
buzzing over the drone of the I-55 traffic
and the chatter of the cicadas in the high weeds around me.

We, the insects and I,
watched the clouds mass and gather
in the muddied sky over our heads.

I plucked a slender blade of yellowed grass
and chewed it as I thought about
where I should be going

and where I wanted to be going instead.
Cocked my head to listen to fingers of music
snatched from the open windows of bright red

and blue big rigs streaming past;
I created my own love songs from the snippets heard
and those I created to fill in the blanks.

I wish I had a voice,
wish I could sing a song with our/my name in it -
but my voice is no good and my words have failed me.

Even as I think this my car is cooling,
the day is passing,
I pick myself up to go, irresolute,

Far away from all of this
someone may be thinking about me
or someone else has entirely forgotten about me and .....

they are all far away
and today is today.
I wave to the sunshine hued plane,

drop my blade of grass to the ground with his brothers,
and climb back in to my dusty red car,
pointing it north once again.