BIG CHINO'S 1954 CHEVY EL PASO TX.

This is how things begin in the garage and end out on the street cruising and it seems we get to a point in life that there's not turning around. Not even veiled. My step-father wanted to keep things documented, wanted each old acquired vehicle sold back to its past use.

I lost the dread of oil slicked waters and exhaust. He was bitter about every cut car, chopped he'd say with disgust and judgment. Every oddly souped up vehicle was for him a loss of history, nerdy loss of history's past, but the flamed painted doors, the Satanic Chicana chick with her tail, the flames telling us there was more to what's shown and more hidden. Every tatoo a pink devil woman, Malinche biding time.

I always liked the new art, the painted engine hoods, la virgen, the whore, the risque bizness of creating something new. But it was the antiques strict in the guidelines of restoration where sorrow came like a shadow forever on the surface of the floating moon.

My old man was dead in the past, in the resurrection of walls and porous arachnid traps, but I sense something new in the old cruising. Freedom. Hydraulics. Hemp and happiness.

Reasonable men leave me dead in leaves, in the color of leaves. Oh showy body, slick with the last great age of petroleum.

We reap what we sow. We sow what we reap. Karma, Karma, Karma, the bad birds cawed in the thick layers of smoke. Gyre. Gyre. We hear the old echo, but these birds are ravenously throaty and they bobble and squack trying to drown the sound of engines.

It was the last testament to our strange love mask, something of loving and another of need or was it green; how a storyteller says it sideways, face turned profile shadow
and uncertainty walked its brave prayers, and it was time to cut the whole angle and sing.

Her voice tremor and tenuously stretching itself nowhere. His certain criticisms left the cars unfinished too long. Rumble seats unfilled, chokes unchocked, and the world was this strange geometry and the Puerto Negra was finally more than a song. It opened like the gates of hell, flames and fire and heat in the desert. Some searched for water, others ran beside the cut shells of newer cars, glowing.

My old man was dead in the past, in the resurrection of so many walls and porous arachnid traps, for I believed in transference, in contageons and criteria, but I lost the sense of waking or dreaming, I do not know, but the world was filled and filled and we were so very thirsty.

It was la Puerta Negra, the black crape paper hanger at the party, it was the way the remodeled engines tickled and tocked, how the women dressed in old finery and the play acting began and began.

What is there to facade and need? We were not connecting with words too private to declilne. We trade what's dead for what's living.