From time to time
the vehicle of your life–
the one you're driving even as you read this–
disappears from the busy streets you navigate daily
and reappears on some empty, unknown, rural road.

What landscape is this?
Signs point to places you do not know.
People (many faintly familliar) freely offer direction;
they're always wrong.

So you just drive,
turn after bewildering turn,
endlessly "recalculating,"
until, on a long, lonely stretch of rutted interstate
it finally hits you:
there is no way back.
Someone has reprogrammed the GPS.

Wherever this trips ends,
it's not where you started.

From time to time
this is what happens.

Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.