Writing a Love Poem on the Way Home

Green miles roll
like frames on a film reel:
still-frame thoughts on
real-time roads are
yellow dashes smeared
to a half-seen blur.

Stop signs ignored like regret—
I'm all too happy to forget
wasted days of simple verse.
So now I speed onward,
the way more than familiar,
the telling of a familiar tale.

Sorting a storyboard
for a collage of memory,
a rhyming scrapbook of you,
suddenly it strikes me
(like a truck, or a tree, or a
truncated line)

that this cinematic concept—
are we just a movie paused
a few moments from the end? —
is the black ice of reality;
and staring into darkness,
my only companion a junkyard

of totaled ideas,
I unlatch my seatbelt
(damp with molded metaphor)
and brace against the floor
to kick open the door
of metaphorical epiphany, thinking

it's a shame it took this to
realize you're already a poem
only a fool would rewrite.