Jan Kerouac Baby Driver
“Looking for adventure
in whatever comes my way
I was a true nature’s child
Born to be wild—–” Steppenwolf
Dreams of Hawaiian island paradise
home ends up in a hopped up car
chase, shotgun seat riding
with a mad husband in wife’s stolen
late model car, listening to Pink
Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon”—-
and all that you give and all that
you take, all you create and all you
destroy—-“HPD in hot pursuit,
high on bennies, weed, skin popping
coke, chugging Jack from an open fifth
one hand on the console, one hand on
the steering wheel, taking corners on
two wheels, eyes marble, hard as
carved statues, graveyard markers,
the plots where they lay low under palm trees,
engine ticking as it cools, police searchlights
crisscrossing their sweating, lathered
faces as they remain, somehow, unseen,
breath coming in short, hot gasps,
waiting for the right moment to break
loose, to play another round of highway
bumper cars, pinball with oncoming traffic,
singing the national anthem of the doomed,
the not so youthful anymore, “Born to Be Wild,”
ending up in an Emergency Room
with a handful of warrants and head full
of stitches, a brutal hangover, blank memory
spaces that can never be filled.
Strange
to think now
Kerouac went
to Columbia
on a football
scholarship
was this
hardassed
hardrunning
back pro
prospect
maybe
when Columbia
football wasn’t
a bad Ivy
League joke,
career cut
short by
leg injury,
sport’s loss
lit’s gain,
that career
also cut short
by booze,
sudden death,
no overtime
to make
miraculous
comeback
Allen Ginsberg with Arkansas Poets Before the Statue
of Christ of the Ozarks 1969
That giant, unnaturally white, alien
figure, crafted by anti-Semite artist,
a fact not lost on Allen, whose sardonic
smile suggests a well-honed sense of irony,
here, before the statue, mock seriously
celebrated for having extended arms both
long enough and strong enough to hold
a pair of VW bugs suspended by cables
like ornaments calibrating the strength of
Jesus and post-industrial miracles such as
an inexpensive, efficient vehicle for the
common man, gas ovens for the racially impure.
Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight
“In the middle of the night he sat up
screaming, there they were again, the short,
quick commands, the dogs barking, the muted
buzzing of voices, But no crying, no scream.”
Gerte Weil, Last Trolley to Beethovenstraat
No hope inside the impromptu camps, enclosed by
barbed wire, hastily built guard towers,
klieg lights spanning the barren grounds;
All night the guard dogs are led on leashes in
teams of three barking at anything that
dares to move;
And on command the captured musicians play,
reed instruments, abused, howling as if
distressed, an ungodly quintet played through
split lips, mourning the passage of time and
an absence of the essentials, food, medical
supplies, strings;
Inside, the blind commissioner plays Patience
with stacked decks, rubbing the centers
of the face cards clean, substituting spades
for all the raw hearts, digging graves
with the calloused tips of his fingers;
All night the camp radios broadcast Schubert, Schreker,
martial music, a choral nightmare by Orff,
“De Temporum Fine Comedida”, one after the other
as a punishment for suspected misdeeds;
By morning it is impossible to tell the prisoners
from the guards.
An Elegy for a City Courtyard, For Gregory Corso
Wandering lost in inclement raindead night,
stumbledrunk and insane with love
of the word and the wine and womensong
and the bomb and all the fallout that
comes with it;
Crying loud in voices of the dead emergent
from subway sewers dressed in Brooks
Brothers pinstriped and consigned to
holding cells, drunktanks, clawing padded
walls, The Tombs, Rikers;
Howling with Allen, chic hipsters, beat writers
measuring their existence in coke spoons,
shot glasses, pint bottles, all the living
effluents in the discarded backalley
streaming consciousness;
Saluting all the downtrodden brothers, cheapfix
hipsters, bumsrushed flat on their faces
ejected from jazzclubs tricksters high on
life, the music of their peers, spheres,
split lipsters, slick with rancid blood;
Laughing, hyenadoged by thoughtpolice, laughpolice,
poetpolice, Lenny dead as the livingword,
all the white collar drunks who leaned on
bars and demanded, “Isn’t it time the house
bought a drink?”;
Listening to the inevitable reply, “But, Sir you just got here!”,
just landed on the first floor in the land
of the poetkings, no longer is it only for
the blind to see, no longer is it only for the deaf
to hear, the voiceless to speak;
Leaving New York, leaving Newark, New Jersey, New
Foundlands, leaving Las Vegas with John O’Brien
drunk on your ass, leaving it all behind; too bad you
have to die to earn complete respect, to win
the highest honors of all.
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