No Free Parking

No Free Parking

I feed the meter
twelve young nickels and a well-trod dime.
It’s not enough.
The meter says what it really wants is virgins - so I tell it,
no one carries those anymore.
And besides, I’m an American man.
My Chinese pockets just aren’t made
for that.
So it’s a late and unsatisfying lunch,
a criminal strike.
And the little grey matchstick is mad as hell.
Dipped and gritted,
ready to go.
And I realize now it’s just looking for a fight,
a goat to burn, some awful flaming sacrament -
so I say so, and the meter admits it
adding that it only waits for the winds,
for Santa Ana.
Mad tribe of the east and Great Coyote nowhere,
to speed the eating and bear away the plates.
The fires will crawl from the fat and happy dreams,
but they are themselves unimportant, says the meter,
a means to an end.
It’s after the remnants, the heart of the char -
worm eaten beams of a decadent, drowsy house,
a fresh spread of oracle bones.
It's after answers.

I try to imagine the hunger.
the festering hurts and the
rage.
But I’ve led a very un-meterish life until now,
and it's hard to relate.
So the meter says, Imagine for a moment
that you're a creature of the sea, a lobster in the pot,
scalding, dying, done,
or strapped and sane in an asylum,
keen enough to know you don't belong,
but the pills are fantastic and soon you do
belong.
Or perhaps a karmic bull’s eye, a god-blasted atoll
of cosmically tested apocalypse.
And finally a slurper of dirty coinage,
nothing but a phlegm-encrusted obstacle for vagrants and vixens and
idiot-driven machines,
watching the world as it walks over dollars,
murders for dimes.
Just another stripe of  highway detritus on the ragged pants of the West,
sick, sodden rag of sweaty palms and itchy feet.
Always searching, searching, searching
for a pattern in the rust,
a savior in the silt.

And I begin to understand that
really,
its just another sad menagerie of beautiful questions and
shitty answers.

The poor little meter looks to me for aid,
its desperate now – possibly suicidal,
and together we still cannot find a reason for the ruts.
No numbing juices in the last of the stash.
Just rats and wrappers and kernels unable to pop.
I've nothing to offer it, as it slumps to the stone.
The bandannas are banned
and so is the tea.

Why go on? it asks,
There’s nothing legendary here,
nothing worthy of song.
It’s all just numbers and nonsense,
a riot of blazing asses and flapping citations
twice an hour,
twelve hours a day,
seven days a week,
and on and on and on.

And I am no help, no help at all.
So I make up some bad excuse,
and leave it there, all haggard and hopeless.

How was I to know
that the thing would build an altar there on the side of the road.
A cunning monument of pixels and platinum and enthusiastic plans,
slop-knot shoelaces and incandescent hopes -
a tyrant toppling harbinger,
a serious business.
How was I to know
that goats would be fashioned there – mechanical ones,
dumb as the sun and just as reliable,
or that Santa Ana would come, at last, with his horsemen,
and that from this shabby altar, this maniacal Mecca,
would rise a mighty silicon god, a vast, alien presence
with no love for men, no sympathy
in its terrible digital heart.
All smoke and sparks and
mind-blowing arithmetic.
How was I to know
that this new god would not be impressed
by gold and blood and promises?
the old one was.

All I wanted was to park my goddamn car.