This Poem

This poem sits silent
while I quench the thirst of
ten thousand years,
or what seems so, days doppelgänging
more nights than year’s have time
to spend.

This poem has nowhere left
to journey,
no bottom-shelf literary magazines
to submit itself,
no captive audience to hear the
silence of its absence.

This poem, a battered old mattress;
a motel with vacancies,
flaunting free HBO and an
ice machine to chill away the long
hot hours ahead.

But no one drives past this highway any
longer, and these days this poem
flashes its phosphorescent lights for
none but me.