Fullerton never disappoints: there's chicken dimples, Cheech Wizard tags, the backstroke pool with arms raised to light, the yellow busses that fill the lot, the weed-cracked GA tarmac you could shoot skeet off, the Orange County produce crate illustrations of harvest girls from the Golden Age embossed on the concrete, the Maverick Theatre, tree debris recycling, Tom Thumb Miniature Golf, the bent dyecast Leo Fender f-hole by the diner at the station where the Mennonites with beards and bonnets always wait for Mexico along with the Yeshiva School and the Missionaries of Christ in their Epstein blue and white sari’s and the strangest vagrant army of lapsed ones from the extremities of California dreaming who lounge and look on as if nothing really matters but nodding in non-comprehension and non-compliance cool as jackals.
It’s not the palm trees enduring every season or the wide-mouthed tin-roof shacks where the cars that no longer work go. There’s nothing wrong at all: the lanterns are like candles where the families wave and glow, but I don’t know … I drive home to Townes Van Zandt as he prophesizes those Flying Shoes by the event next door for my neighbor the Mayor now red, white and blue, in another perfect silver screen play where light allures as it elides, enlightens as it falls, the moon no mortal glow.