I was thirty-three in the seventies

When I killed my career

Writing melodies for nobody

I had filled seventeen years

If a tree falls in the woods

Was there ever a tree there at all?

The analogy botched

In my practice garage

Bandmates stare up at the wall

I clarify

"If no one is listening

I’ve got a plan where

We bury our last album

Under a two foot plaque on the town square

And we’ll play one final concert

Say that we’ll rise up someday."

I hung press releases

Pestered baristas

But in the end nobody came

We dig anyway that we could to move on for good

The leftover merch lit up like firewood

My drummer decides to start limousine driving

The bass built a barbecue shack in his old neighborhood

And where we once stood it still sits there today:

A time capsule plaque with my firstborn's birthdate

And the word “Wait.”

I was fifty-three in the nineties

When my daughter found the plaque

The discovery was embarrassing

I held back

So proud as the founder

Of the town’s first Waitsgiving Day

She asked for an anthem

I sat down and wrote one

The last song that I ever made

And lately I’m found jogging downtown

Stopped at the plaque where I’m scratching the ground

With a grapefruit spoon and then one afternoon

A song on the radio calls out my digging somehow

The track after that is a song I once sang

About the long run, so I run, run away

Past the stand with the snowcones and

Hear my old bass player say

That I don’t

Have to wait

Now at seventy-three, I ask humbly

In my garage

If you’d all agree to form a team

And take back the album I lost

If a tree falls in the woods

It might sound like one last final plan

Naysayers will say you can’t take back the past

But in this case I think that we can