five decades in a blind alley

One day you wake up to discover you're locked inside the trunk of a car you've been driving around inside of your head with no destination in mind, watching life go by through the hole of a punched out tail light.  

 Then you throw off the burial should of last night's hangover, only to find yourself staring down the barrel of a gun that's half a century long and growing, and wondering when fate would finally pull the trigger, or if life would bully you into one day having to do it yourself. Each of us is born with a contract on our head, after all, but most of us never know when and where the hit-man cometh, or what his weapon of choice will be. 

Time tightens around your neck like a noose, and each tick of the clock echoes in your ear like a deadbolt lock through an empty prison. And as you stumble to greet the growing stranger in the mirror once again, five decades step out of a blind alley and clobber you over the head with a crowbar, and take everything you thought you were ever gonna be when you grew up, and everything you hoped you were ever gonna have.

It's only then that the reality that's been right under your nose the whole time comes up and slaps you in the face with a hand as indifferent as concrete. And through the alchemy of indecision, your tomorrows become yesterdays, and you discover that the future you'd been waiting for with such anticipation was the station you pulled out of when you got on this train in the first place.

To the gallows we dance upon a tightrope as thin as time, over the gaping maw of an insatiable eternity, and twice as indifferent. 

Look down, for night reaches for us all from the shadows, with fingers of fog and numb. And as the wind howls for the dying sun, those fingers summon us into their cold embrace. And into that 'boundless depth of midnight cavern where no ray of light from the fading sky can penetrate, we tremble of what sightless Stygian worlds may lay beyond.'  

In the distance a lone wolf serenades the moon, and reminds us that whatever end may come ...

  will always come too soon