Poem on the subject of Jack Kerouac
Jack’s down with Blake: You know that grain of sand shit.
He look over city streets as a farmer
his plot
grimacing at the weeds
but in love with them as well
He reads these poems in the morning paper
over coffee and beneath bold headlines titled
bank robbery, Building construction-demolition, and the obituary page
Loving father of three; a memorial
He reads these poem in bus stop scribbles
in the neon painted cartouche
letters climbing the latticework of walls
Chaka, Salue, GRIM,13th St. Kings. BSV and BREAK
He reads them, these poems
in the streetlights beneath their pyramid glow
and the pin prick stars
with violent wonder how that if we sit on the pit-bottom ocean floor of the black, black universe. the cosmos above us
those infinite fathoms that rest over us but do not crush us
but allow us to go on our hum-drum way
He hears these poems in sirens, in the slamming of doors
the rumbling of garbage trucks, hy-draul-ic hisssssssss
in the undulating subway floor
in the heartbroken cries of freight trains passing
calling the mountains to us
He hears these poems in the jabber of slang-tongued youths,
in the cat call and street fights curses
in the acccch-pt of a man spiting into the gutter
and the terse metronome of a woman’s high heel quick-step j-walk
in the gulping groans of naked strangers out bedroom windows in that tepid summer air
even if alone, he imagines them
maybe they are stranger to themselves or maybe not but sometime he imagines them so
He touches these poems, they are coarse and indifferent, cool like concrete
they are the soles of shoes, worn out and resoled
they are sharp like the chipped teeth of broken alley glass
sometimes, they are ice like fashioned metal bars
Other times they burn to touch
He recognizes stanzas, verses, odes in the landlords, hooded hustlers
and restless single mothers
in the migration negro as he etches out identity denied him by an indignant history
in 6’five transvestites
and shortest distance between-points businessmen
and, and, and the girls in short dresses with hoop earrings
so round they could pass up her arm to the shoulder
in handcuffs, billy clubs and corruption the righteous try to name the two am gin joint jazz
He smells them out
a bloodhound for the perfume of blood and piss and sweat and sex
the urban bouquet, squalid aroma and beautifully rank
They sit, these poem before him like before a portraitist
in park benches, slumbering beneath pedestrian walks
They lie naked in an uneasy sleep
Poems turn to him
and hurriedly travel passed
brought before his feet everyday
disguised in a different face
a foreign voice
A thousand different citizens of word
He confesses
recognizes
you, you, you
I remember, I know you,
I smile familiar
Do you know me?
Do you know my face
Do you know you are my beloved
A madman skin bruised like an old leather belt ambles by
screaming “ I am the king of Pain.”
He pays to you silent tribute
The musicians dip and dive in the watery smoke bar air
He pays to you silent tribute
The Church steeple stands believing
while expressway congestion looses faith
while the Sky-scrapers aspire to Babel
He is here, in the city amounts his kind
happily like one in nature
or the devote before their God
He pay to you silent tribute
