In the fall we were so ready
to die under christmas lights
left up for months next to
dried-out fountains and
mismatched metal furniture
Sweaty, we baptized each
other with iced coffee
incense and revolution
so careless and unguarded
as to never feel lonesome

driving sunset today
stuttering so i stopped for gas
filling up watch the pollen
over a woman and her minivan
pollen like a swarm of bees
under godly clouds
i wish I were already old and dead
thunderstorm now over
tiny America before we all lose it
i drove away from home at the
most summer-time
straight past balmy and slow pollen
and just here then just here on the corner
naked before the glory of
the driving sunset

Jack Kerouac made my momma hitch

down the west coast from Seattle to

Albaquerque in the 1970s but she

never made it to Mexico

Jack Kerouac made my dadda struggle

through an English major only to dig

ditches and deliver mail twenty years later

Jack Kerouac made me who I am today

a Dharma *** looking for any highway

outta here to Frisco to New York City to

subsist solely on coffee and searching for

Nirvana and being forever unsatisfied

with the name I was chained to at

birth people ought to choose their own

Jack Kerouac made who I am tomorrow

completely impossible to discern but he

filled me with blank paper and handed

me a pen and Thoreau the great

Transcendentalist made me write in

the dark but Jack Kerouac made me

transcend the ******* and write

for nothing for Buddha for smoky

haze for the turtle that walks with

the world on its back I may now

never stop looking for me in the

streets of Denver to ask me where

I would be without Jack Kerouac