All that glitters

Driving through Las Vegas back to LA I pass a

bee-hive coiffed woman in a white Cadillac -

Coupe De Ville gold plated on its side

Her left earring a cell phone - her right hand driving the world

She's calling her salon - her client - her divorce attorney

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Las Vegas in 1994 looks like a Barbie doll theme park

In 1954 it was a Roy Rogers movie - real one-armed bandits

Country music - no sales tax - no paper dollars

Cowboy boots and five-gallon hats blazed a rodeo trail

Kangaroo Courts and Country Fairs

where sixteen-year-old girls

Learned how to do it

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How to turn men's heads and hard work into velvet couches

and sixty-foot double-wides - then dig a hole in the

desert sand when they wore out and needed replacing

So she could buy that Coupe De Ville with a car phone

*

I pull into the Last Chance Gas Station Casino-Restaurant for gas

and a last chance to win some gas money - food money

baby’s new shoe money before going back to work Monday

*

A steel-faced shaded eye Security Cop brushes past me

His left hand a walkie talkie a retired could-have-been

spending his paycheck on Keno and drugs to pay for his

chosen profession - He married a sixteen-year-old native gal

when making tracks - passing through from Idaho

and stopped for a ninety-five-cent breakfast

got caught by the glitter now his dead tracks

are dead dreams of surfin’ Malibu and

starring in a re-make of Rebel Without a Cause

Dead in the waterless sand for two babies - a velvet couch

and trailer payments - worn out and replaced by his wife's

Gold plated Coupe De Ville Cadillac