The T-Rex that ate Tucson

mage borrowed from bing

The T-Rex that ate Tucson

“Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an

expanded desert of ignorance.”

---Will Durant

“We’re having a heat wave,

a tropical heat wave--” sang Marilyn Monroe

in her very breathy sexy style,

and hell yes, we are,

from coast to coast, 

waves of sweltering heat

with triple digit temperatures,

sporting 100% humidity, causing

dripping shirt-soaking sweat

to paste down your hair, rolling

into your stinging eyes, saturating

your skivvies, making you feel like

you peed your pants when you stand up;

finding yourself in a steamy bar in Arizona,

knocking down your third cold one, still

angry at the overheated assholes encountered

on the expressway; rushing

from the A/C in your Acura

to the icy A/C in Izzy’s, swimming

through the scalding air

like a leaping dolphin, safe

in the tavern darkness as you

glance out the window and you see

a god damned gray green T-Rex stomping

through the parking lot, leaping over dusty pick ups,

and the sombitch is still there after

you have closed your eyes, shaken your

wet head, & reopened them again, 

so you deduce you are not really drunk yet,

so the 20 foot carnivore is not a beer hallucination,

so maybe those dark thunderclouds boiling

in the sky have cooled the upper stratosphere

and the demon dinosaur was merely

a “Fata Morgana” mirage--just an unusually

clear & elaborate bending of heated light rays

that shape-shifted within the bowels of the blazing

compressed stretched air, alternating between

being erect & inverted,

and probably that’s why no trucks had been flattened,

no terrible hair-raising roaring was heard as this hazy

ditzy Dino was dancing to a Latin beat in your head,

that the hot layers of air were acting as a prism,

yes, yes--you remembered now, there is

a life-size concrete Tyrannosaurus Rex three miles

out of town on Route 66, at a roadside park--

so screw it for now, it’s time to order

a beer-and-a-bump, and turn your fevered gaze

to the blond cowgirl in the sexy tattered

Daisy Duke short-shorts, with no bra,

with her wet blouse tied up under his big breasts,

and her bare mid-riff shining with perspiration,

because she was real,

or at least you hoped to Christ

she was as you staggered studily 

toward her shimmering image. 

Glenn Buttkus

July 2013

Posted over on dVerse Poets Poetics

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