Pump-and-run
Chris Moore
It’s November and all the lizards are
frozen. I am standing in plumes of gas
fumes outside Boulder, filling up, while cows
get fat next door and stand in line for the big corral
in the sky. Which makes him think about capitalist China,
where the ministry of religion says that you must register
for a legal reincarnation and hope they don’t run out
of humans before you reach the queues terminus. You
might end up reptilian or bovine, thumbing through
catalogues of frost and slaughter. And I wonder
if the velvet ropes at the door to the hereafter are real
velvet or just velour like some Formica clad club on
east Colfax.
However, this road is no allegory but
another form of lingering. Just the taillight
heartbreak of running ten minutes late. To the west
the mountains look like someone wanted so desperately
the earths secrets that they tore the envelope wide,
but the east has the cool regard of a credit card
bill or a verdict sliced with a letter opener.
High tension lines stitch together the wounds that jets leave.
Commuters around him rush to wait
to pay. Beneath the whole scenethe secret history of life becomes crude
oil. And the sky is filled with ranks and files
of folks packed into aluminum cans and hurled
across the American Night like a new stuntman race.
There was the space age, the jet age, a story’s
age and now is the yawn age. The words rocket fuel and
plane crash carry sleepy connotations. Factory
farmed chickens have four breasts and no beak. Where
everything is truly exciting and utterly ignored.
There is a twenty in my pocket. There is a line three
deep to pay. I catch milky
bovine stares as I leave.
without paying.
