7:30 AM gas station convenience store apocalypse
7:30 AM gas station convenience store apocalypse.
A service center for marginalized souls.
Here I am, rock me like a…
Wagner is not playing / Kool and the Gang
Man walks out with a corndog for breakfast
He drops it on the concrete.
He picks it up. He eats the whole dog in one bite.
A man skates up and he’s chained to his skateboard
He’s got chains coming out of his face and chest
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 in 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 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.
At lunch I visit a bookstore.
A ten-stack of Brautigan paperbacks rests near the register.
It’s a haul. I do a double take,
The volumes reek of smoke and wine.
Owner tells me a man “hard on his luck”
just came into sell them.
The owner bought them for a song.
I missed the man by minutes!
I would have doubled what he received,
right there!
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 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?