END OF THE PAVEMENT

At sunset in the high desert
an old man gets on a new motorcycle
and rides it to the end of the pavement.
At this elevation even cactus won’t grow.
There’s nothing but silence and open space.
He shuts off the engine and puts the kickstand down.
He sits and lets the vacuum of action suck him away.
There once was a time when life had fullness and direction.
There existed a time when joy made life noisy and vibrant.
That was all taken away from him in fits of anger and bouts of trauma.
Reality has a way of crashing down sometimes.
One cannot stand forever among the broken pieces
trying with innocent hope and errant pride for what once was.
What is gone is gone and leaving it gone is the hard medicine one has to take.
It’s only asking for a world of hurt for an old man
to have a young man’s dream. That kind of dream burns too hot to hold onto
and to expect to chase such a thing down with old man legs is laughable at best.
An old man knows too much to run himself ragged over phantoms,
even if those ghosts of fulfillment haunt one’s soul.
Facing facts in a relentless present moment is more horrific than bittersweet.
For what it was worth, for as long as it lasted,
the old man thought he had found a lifetime love unique and rare,
a love that shined as soul mates across endless time and many lives.
He once lived brightly as though such a thing was core to his soul.
But that was a fool’s illusion, nothing but crazy folly, that rubric
was brought crashing down in a HUGE way and left as bloody shards in the hot sand.
Now there’s nothing left but to walk across those shards
and feel them crunch underfoot, under those tenderfoot bare feet.
If only the final downfall had happened earlier, not later in life.
If only the bottom had fallen out at an earlier time when
there could have been enough life and energy and naivete left to rebuild something.
If only the blow had come sooner when he still would have had
some youthful resilience and spirit to recover.
Where does an old man go when the pavement ends but the day is not done,
when night is about to fall but midnight into the next life is hours away?
Does one leave behind the ride of one’s life and set out on foot?
Does one at this point in life hope for an oasis out there somewhere across the desert?
Has it really come down to a choice between the most unlikely and the impossible?
They say the first cut is the deepest and there may be some truth to that.
But the first cut is usually not the most accurate cut.
Get cut when you’re older and wiser and feel deeper and more true.
Now that’s the cut that runs you through and through.
That’s the cut that goes more than deep.
That’s the cut that severs the very thing one has become
after a lifetime’s ride into the desert.