Nervous Laughter in the Church

Flutter-hearted giggles trickle onto the Bostonian airwaves,

Leaping the Charles to Rhode Island

And telling stories about vans with no air conditioning,

    Baptists from Seattle

    And brotherly love.

Melting guitars rubbed down with slow-burning onions sing into the night,

    Pills, wandering, Russian siblings and existentialism on their tongues,

Piercing the concrete walls of a June basement radio studio.

Bouncing across the mountains to a Texaco on a dead road

    Under an oncoming sky lined with bleaching bones

Hung in a window on the wall of a Pawtucket teenager.

Nestling into the pocket of a happy homeless man,

    A fading hippie from Connecticut,

As he carries a transistor radio from Manhattan to San Francisco one last time.

He stops and braces against a skinned Coca-Cola sign outside that Texaco.

He caught a ride to Arizona from the same spot in '68. 

A black sandstorm breathes into the sky and staggers West

To bleach away the dessicated road and the senile Texaco.

The teenager melts into warm sleep,

The man smiles into the storm

And the radio's tinny serenade goes on.