GAS Featured Poet: PW Covington

 PW Covington writes in the Beat tradition of the North American highway.

He has been a featured reader at San Francisco's Beat Museum, and has had work nominated for both Pushcart and Best of the Net awards.
   Covington lives in New Mexico, two blocks off Historic Route 66. www.PWCovington.com .

Rosie’s Cafe

The place

Rosie’s Cafe

On Madison

With a rose on the sign

Is post-pandemic packed

Folding chairs unfolded

Under folding tables, open

On Saturday

Cowboy hats and trucker caps

Veterans of foreign wars

In stained T-shirts and torn blue jeans 

Drink percolated coffee

Bacon, biscuits, gravy

And as 

They amble out

To decent Dakota errands and tasks

7th Day Adventists

Sharp suits and business dresses

File in

Filling folding tables

With folded hands

Ordering blanquitos fritos y pan tostado

Hoping to make it to heaven en Español

On a Saturday 
Sabado

The timeless, always, Universal waitress

Fills coffee mugs

And splits the check

At every table

As light grey

Late June rain

Falls indifferently 

Outside

 

Turquoise Hope

We lay in my adobe refuge
Smoking
The world dies outside

Summer often ends abruptly in the mountains
We keep to ourselves in such seasons

When this ends, I want to
Take a vacation, she says
Somewhere far away and foreign
Someplace I can hide
Invisible and muted
Deaf and unaware
Of the chittering, native, word-sound-voices
Above all your vices, 
She says

I fill that room with smoke
Sativa curls caress the pine vegas
Reminding me of bingo halls
And sawdust floors
And steel guitars
And red dirt roads

Iron oxidized like blood vessels
Twisted around property lines
Mesquite posts and barbed wire
Defensive

Basalt over sandstone
Copper tears dry into turquoise 
On nights like this
And the parking situation has not improved

I nod and I hold her close until
She’s snoring
Every dream-filled breath of solitude and slumber

All I want to do is rejoin the galactic and fantastic
Human shit and shine show
The cum and go show
Casino sunglass Saturday night show
Gospel mirrors and Cotton-Eyed Joe show
The mask and pony
Serotonin and endorphin show
French kissed like a 220 socket
I want to jump back in and swim in it
All of it, 1990’s leftover sex and patent leather
Baptize me in your lack of better judgement
I’ve been made of stone too long

It’s all about the breath this year
Aspiration and ventilation
Inspiration, greed, negotiations
Basalt over sandstone
Subtle turquoise hope