7:30 a.m. gas station convenience store corndog New American Diaspora apocalypse
7:30 AM gas station convenience store apocalypse.
A service center on the Southern Oregon Coast for marginalized souls.
Food to go, barely digested to power the stasis of the New American Diaspora.
Wagner is not playing like the helicopter assault in Apocalypse Now.
The Scorpions are: Here I am, rock me like a...
A man walks out with a corndog for breakfast
He drops it on the concrete, on a sheen rainbow of gas and oil.
He picks it up.
He eats the dog in one gulp.
It's a slick, silky, fossil fuel maneuver worthy of a poem,
so here it is, a poem of the streets that never finds print in poetry journals,
but gets written in mustard all the time.
And yes, I have seen a haiku written in mustard on a sidewalk.
A man skates up, chained to his skateboard.
He's got chains coming out of his cheeks, belly button, nostrils and chest,
(probably his scrotum, too).
Three tattooed women, 30, 50, 70, pump gas.
An obese couple buys matching Monsters.
A man in fatigues buys chew and a Lunchable
No way Steinbeck or Carver could have written books about these people.
No way Woody or Bruce could have written songs about these people.
I can't even imagine Dylan working a fallen corndog
or a man chained
to a skateboard into a song.
How would a painter paint this?
There is no streaming show about them
but their show streams live for free every day.
They are something new in America, or perhaps not.
(Have they always been among us?)
They need chroniclers,
but that work doesn't pay enough for a corndog a day.
On my lunch break from a dangerous joke of a newspaper,
I visit a bookstore.
A ten-stack of Brautigan paperbacks rests near the register. TEN!
I do a double take.
It's like walking into a field full of daises after a carpet bombing.
The volumes reek of smoke and wine,
perhaps even of a decomposing Brautigan
who blew his face off with a shotgun
but wasn't discovered for two weeks.
The owner tells me a man “hard on his luck”
just came into sell them.
The owner bought them for a song.
I missed the desperate man by mere minutes!
I would have doubled what he received, tripled,
right there!
Or I would have demanded an oath he never sell them.
Except for cigarettes and wine
because Richard would have approved.
There those book sat.
I thought about buying the lot
and distributing them with corndogs
at the convenience store during
the next morning's apocalypse.
But no one would give a shit.
A man can't read while skateboarding
(although I have seen it).
It's not the way to get anywhere
with this subject.
What is?