Observer Blues

Walked into a bar on a Tuesday night, nobody knew my name. Said “My boy was born tonight — handsome as Gregory Peck.” They laughed, I drank, the jukebox played a song I already knew by heart. I’m just the shadow in the rearview, rolling through these neon hues. Every face I see looks right through me, that’s the price of the Observer Blues. She asked me the way to the beach, but the ocean was a lie. Her skin caught the blinds’ thin light, lines of silver across her thighs. I reached my hand to the wall, played puppets in the sun, she laughed — said “Don’t move, you look like someone I used to love.” I’m just a camera with no film left, a traveler with nothing to lose. Hearts pass by like headlights fading, out on the Observer Blues. My old man said one thing worth keeping: “I remember dancing at twenty, and not feeling sick. It feels like yesterday, but sixty years slipped away.” Now I feel the weight of that clock in my bones. I left a blue scarf on a mountain shrine, out where the wind forgets your name. Didn’t believe in gods, but prayed just the same. Said, “Take her fever, leave her flame.” Never got an answer, but she breathed again. Crowds started breaking me, the noise too loud to stand. In a diner off Route 66, a stranger talked — I couldn’t answer. All I heard was an old Arabic song, distorted in a trucker’s radio. Back then the horizon never scared me. Now even silence does. Met her again, years older, the same wild eyes. She laughed, said “Still running?” I said, “Still watching.” We danced out of time, but the song never stopped. She made my heart remember its job. I’m just a shadow with a story, rolling past the motel’s fuse. Every dawn’s another chapter, and the road still hums the Observer Blues. And the road still hums the Observer Blues.