The Dream Won’t Come True

When we pull into the Sheetz station

on one of the first warm days of spring to gas up,

the ’80s ear bug “Sara,” loud over the speakers,

makes us glad to be alive. We’re ready to commit

to a rewards card because gas is cheap

and the song reminds us of being young,

which today means not yet

orphans and still surprisable. Inside are hundreds

of caffeinated drinks both hot and cold.

We’re fire and ice, goes the Starship song,

like the Frost poem, “Fire and Ice,” and both

are deadly serious in the same silly way.

Rebecca De Mornay starred as Sara in the music

video, and a woman appropriately less

hot as the singer’s mother, both lost

to him, despite the upbeat tempo.

More pop than the Jefferson Airplane of the ’70s,

the pedigree’s there, unlike Grace Slick’s clothing

that night at Gaelic Park when rain shorted

the amps out and stripping seemed to soothe

the crowd. It’s no good to go back

in time. My father-in-law, an old socialist,

met his buddies for coffee at his local Sheetz,

originally a small east coast franchise. People talk

of “good” or “peaceful” deaths as if they’ve seen one,

but it’s always looked like agony to me,

despite the morphine. And knowing at the end

of a hard life that shit gets even harder makes me

long for oblivion, the storm in Sara’s ice-blue

eyes, Grace Slick’s wet breasts. The candles

on the evergreens in spring, so named for their

brightness, their floating phosphorescent fires,

are cold to the touch. Some say the world will end

in fire,/Some say in ice. No time is a good time

for goodbyes. I’d once have asked, of poem and song,

Where do we go when we say goodbye?

Now, when we download the Sheetz app

and the Shell logo appears on our phones,

we feel the energy drain from our bodies.

What will we ever know?

We dream together below bright waves of distraction

like this poem, which I could end with Frost or fire,

song lyrics, dead dads, Sheetz or Shell. You choose.

Does it matter how it ends if it can’t end well.