gas money


It starts with Rihanna telling me my cards have been declined.
I won’t be putting gasoline into the car today. I don’t have a
response; she sees another car and a driver paying with cash.
I can’t put air into the tires because the pump is wearing the
blue hood of shame, “Out of Order” written in yellow letters,
a punishment for the temporarily useless and inconvenient.
The sigh I released shook Indonesia; I sincerely apologize to
the parents of the virgin who was tossed into the volcano
to appease the gods. I’m still wearing my winter coat although
it’s early May, the burden of a man who needs many pockets
but never to find one wide enough to digest him and his evils.
I drive in circles in the gas station parking lot until everything
disappears.  Colons and semi-colons remain. History does not
“march on”. History is a dalmatian with a strong odor and a
weak stomach on a greasy leash wrapped around the slickest
gear of a perpetual motion machine with a shitty attitude. A
real, goddamned shitty attitude. The marshal is not the comic
book you want him to be. Neither am I. I’ll never get to tell
a government dude, “My superpower? Right now, at this very
second, no one in the state of Connecticut, no one, has to use
the bathroom.” The marshal will do as he does, even if that
means studying a stick-stab of Bigfoot crap. Rain intensifies,
sound amplifies. The line to exit and return to Highway 34
is perverse. I am the lighthouse, I am the binoculars, I am
the fire, I am the beacon, I am the aroused abnormality,
lusus naturae, but without gas money, anticlimactic and
excrementitious: a bad dog. It ends with a ten-dollar bill
announcing itself meekly from the paperback pages of
Regis Philbin’s autobiography, living rent-free in the front
door pocket since I bought the car, and during the epilogue
I watch a movie about drug addiction through the bottom
of a cup of chocolate milk, marking my suicidal tendencies
on a roulette wheel, polishing the latch on Pandora’s Box,
wondering by an open grave if I ever said anything
to make her bite her lower lip.

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