A Post-Lude

I saw myself today,
Age 62, and my hair grey. I was sitting at a stop light with a cigarette in my left and the fingers of my right grasping firmly around the top of the steering wheel. The skin on my face, a subject of time and gravity, was pail, no rose in the cheeks. My lips were tightly closed as though they were holding something in place, my teeth perhaps. Around them ran lines both vertical and horizontal that met two crescent shaped indentions on ether side, which boarded once plump cheeks that now greatly resembled deflated balloons. Like a well read book, with a broken spine and it’s covers curling outward, my shoulders rested in an unnatural manner so that my neck long, and frail, curved like a tree growing out the side of a cliff. My head rested there upon the trunk and on my nose and expressionless face were a pair of rose tinted sun glasses that took up the greater half both my cheeks and forehead. And there I sat, in my white Cadillac, windows down on my way to where, I do not know.