POEMS

BY KIM KERZE

4

The House Jack Kerouac Built

Born from a joual genepool, he rode in on the starry

Dynamo of an East St Louis caboose, all jacked up on whiskey

& loose from the blue notes snatched around a hobo Kerosene

drum, singing sweet Tokay blues, along the busted up tarmac

He spun his words as broad daylight shifted into the onrush

of night - a blurring of simultaneous, ever-present moments

unfolding from coffee cups & sharp Chevrolet’s side mirrors

& apple pies sweetening thru the immensity of the Midwest

& freight yards & imaginary baseball cards, secret rooms

In steel towns, and Dharma lookouts that dealt him a bad blow

Of mourning & melancholia. All this fuelled with Benzedrine

& Proust, Charlie Parker and the road; mediums of the holy ghost.

He miraculously distilled an errant catholic romanticism

From the frontiers of the hipster zeitgeist, as his ears eulogized

A disappearing america & loneliness built up inside of him

Like water pressure, until it poured out in an ever unravelling

Criss-cross of words, traipsing from east to west, and again

back east. His life became the stuff of folklore, as the sixties tilted

into darker Arenas. America prepared a Nebuchadnezzar feast of

its children & the revolution flared like brown acid, a widening gulf

where no reason was found to participate, nor seek

comprehension. He lived the last of his days in a cul de sac

with a bottle that emptied him out, with his cherished Memere

who forgave nearly every failure, and a fading picture Of his saintly

Brother, etched with boyhood tears in a Lowell matinee.

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