Dark Exits

Poetry - by Bruce Boston

Dark exits deliver emotive
velocities and dislocations,
razor sharp instants of perception,
peppered and stirred deeply
with obsessive delusions

It’s easy to take
a dark exit by mistake.

You can be driving at night
to a late dinner meeting,
or some illicit liaison,
or just a market chore,
your mind idly wandering
over what awaits you.
Suddenly the freeway turns,
yet the lane you are in,
the right lane, goes straight.
Traffic is heavy and it’s
too late to change lanes.

That’s how I once took an
off-ramp to a dark exit.
By mistake.

The signs that mark such exits,
if there ever are any signs,
are unlighted or shrouded
by the branches of a tree.
Even when you can make
out the letters on the sign,
they go by too fast for you
to make any sense of them.

And all at once you find
yourself traveling in
a part of the city you
never knew existed,
intricate mazes of streets,
mean and dirty streets,
rife with flickering neon
and elusive temptations.

You find yourself
searching for a sign
to an on-ramp that
will take you back
to the brightly lit
safety of the freeway.

I was alone at the time.
Supposedly the best time
to take a dark exit.
Yet I couldn’t help wishing
there was someone with me,
someone I could trust.

Many return from dark exits
with lives and minds intact.
Some are never the same.
Some are less fortunate:
their cars may surface,
broken down to pieces
in an illegal chop shop,
yet the owners are never
seen or heard from again.

Sometimes when I’m
driving the brightly lit
freeways of the city,
driving at random
for no other reason
than a vague restiveness,
I often find myself 

wondering if I’ll ever
take a dark exit again
By mistake. Of course.

Though who can say?

What if those who never

returned from dark exits

found another exit beyond.

Like entering a black hole

and emerging in a world

with landscapes in which

we could thrive and grow,

a world with its own rules,

one in which we didn’t

drive aimlessly through

the brightly lit night?

Dark exits deliver sensitive
velocities and dislocations,
icy hard instants of perception,
seasoned and shredded deeply
with possessive illusions.