This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of cc&d magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.
Because in Las Vegas everything does mean nothing:
The Thunderbird Motel TV only picks up a Mexican channel that flickers with static.
Bed bugs swarm like city folk atop the
ferric motel mattress. The security guard inked with prison tattoos
looks down at the motel lot and
sees an African American hooker trying to pick up
a father in a station wagon teeming with kids and laughs to me,
“Them nigger bitches. Don’t got no shame.” He slept under the
Tropicana Street Bridge a few years back. The stick-figured meth dealer sells
to the Covenant House kids holed up
across the street. The beefy, muscular supermarket owner
shoves crack heads off his lot. The teen transvestite hooker
shaped like a crane fly lugs around a huge brick in his purse and only wears
a striped shirt and high heels. The mirror cracking strippers unlace their
Catholic high school skirts and shirts. The smaller time casinos that dot the capillaries
of the Strip suck and leech things alive and mammalian. The epidermis
hangs and jiggles off the faces of the sun burnt, slit eyed, sand blasted drifters.
I try to dress like I have no money and the tenants dub me “The Undercover Cop.”
What if anything, everything you wished for never came true and
you had to spend your life in a jar banging your head side to side to
side to side until you swam in a sea of blood and spit and dirt?
What if you were trapped in this aquarium: same fish, same pebbles, same coral,
same bulletproof glass walls?
What if you were an agitating speck of dirt in the thumbnail of some musclehead?
ThenÉyou have to confess you are a dull, dull zero, self at best,
a dainty mite of meat. No loot left.
Your soul lies comatose and clinched and latched, lids shut and stitched.
In a neon marquee church an oily preacher
dispatches snakeskin sermons: “All the heathens here will never feel
the relief of the risen! The Almighty will toss them down to
the scorched and the unbelieving! My people, the clock ticks for us all!
Only the sand that breezes through our alleys lives to tell a story,
and a brutal one at that! It knows that outside our city, the water colored mountains, sculpted by God, right as right, loom and lean and wait to reclaim Las Vegas,
eager in their stony silence! The Lord himself scripted ‘The End’ in white over the sunset,
curlicues and all!!!”
But he lies. The man’s wrong. Dead wrong:
There will always be dull sky between Vegas and the mountains.
