We Are Jack Kerouac (poem)

Carol Novack & co.'s Mad Hatter's Review is at it again.

It is through the offices, as it were, of Mad Hatter's, both the review and a reading I was part of, I learned how to mash a poem (use lots of butter). For the latest issue I offered up two poems, "We Are Jack Kerouac" and "hAve You Been Married, the Sister asK" which was first published by Other Rooms Press (Ed Go, co-editor). "Jack Kerouac" was pulverized.

Here is a link to the Mad Hatter's table of contents and, therefore and perforce and by logical extension and thusly and so on, both poems: http://bunkmagazine.com/madbunkers/layout/unmashed.htm .

I'm also pasting "We Are Jack Kerouac" here. It was included in my collection, The Future Is Happy, BlazeVOX [books}, 2009.


We Are Jack Kerouac

Though not in the sense
we were born in Lowell Mass
or beat it out of there to
get famous, though we
gassed up and burned rubber
in Lowell Mass and in
other states and cities
we hitched rides and smoked
cigarettes on route 66 and
interstate 90 and on weed
and acid on a crazy-eight-
curlicue of L.A. freeways
merging like a concrete Möbius
swapping out autos so on
Thanksgiving-Friday in
nineteen seventy something
we knew that sensory swirl
would be ours, daily everlasting;
in the daily everlasting we'd
lean into endless curves,
and though laws of identity
have things equal to themselves,
i.e., Jack = Jack, there's
the poetic corollary that things
are equal to much that's wild
and so beautiful, like our
holy transfixion on birds
thrumming wings in
the blue guitar of dreams.
But truly we're Jack Kerouac
when morning light catches
now our thrumming adventures,
embarked on long ago.