Gas

I

Steve Abee is a gas station.
The Lord Jesus Christ is a gas station.
Jack Fris is a gas station.
Jack Kerouac is a gas station, too.
We are all gas stations, lonesome lovely gas stations
on the sandy skirt edge of the desert
dispensing starlight octane to each other as we move
from seashore to graveyard.

Time blows its bony nose into a Dixie cup
In the back of a Tijuana Greyhound.

The rain on the street smells like wet feathers.
The sky looks like a bowl of gray marbles.
The cloud kisses the rooftops.
Police cars, fire trucks, air raid horns, ambulances
wail sirens across the sky like John Coltrane
in a cacophonic meditation on love and suffering.
I taste the rain that falls from that horn.
It tastes blue.

That 3 am the boy drove his car into the wall
I could feel his breath dripping down the sidewalk
back to the sea.

Catherine Uribe is my wife. She speaks God.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem whisper the doorways.

II

I am not a gas station. I have no fuel for you.
I am a mini mart. I fill the pre-dawn
nacho sauce need of the unwashed
and addicted.

The earth is in line for some meteoric hand jive.

When I lick your secrets the bombs begin to fall from your thighs.
It isn’t polite to scream fuckin’ dick shit in the middle of the night when
the whole house is asleep.

The shimmering tongue of disaster licks our wounds
Like a child licking the sugar dust from a Pixie Stick.
It is not the fire spiling from the windows
that causes me to be full of dear and dread,
but the trees who watch from the street
not understanding the orange tendrils of hatred and power.
It is not the sky that signifies endlessness
but your fingers pointing to the silence
That surrounds what you just said.

I turn into a plastic army man,
get lost in the backyard
and live on the nectar of the weeds.

III

The Vexer responds with incredulity at being told how to write a poem.
The Vexer mocks the sounds of happiness that come from his belly.
The children tickle him to the green carpet. He cracks
up, turns to dust.

IV

The world will create a toilet that knows what is doing.
The world will stop at the stop lights and go at the go lights.
The world will stop fighting gravity, will accept
the truth of its own light.
The world will learn to whistle.
Our Gargantuan psychic underwear will be cleaned.
The time bomb within, full of high octane denial
will finally burst when all is created again.
Vamanos ala chingada.

Late at night the goldfish turns the light on in its aquarium,
sits on the rock, troubled by the mystery of water.
John Coltrane steps from his limousine at the Last Chance Gas.
The sun sets, he nods to the music in his hands.
Good-bye, Good-bye cry the golden horns of Jerusalem.