Sunrise for Jack Kerouac

(*as published in Drunk in a Midnight Choir on 4/29/15)

I gave Jake the last inhale

Watching  a willow tree in a cow pasture turn to gold in the

Acidic sunrise of a July we tried for years to forget.

The long streams of branch swaying in a breeze that bumped my gooses

From collar bone to sternum

Raised buttons of oooooh, of ahhhhh,

Of push them, push them – – we will never get out of here

if we don’t move faster

 

Before I fall apart

Jake falls asleep against the wind

Shielded dreaming of a riddle on a Popsicle stick

His tiny fingers clutching it

Jamming it into his mother’s wringing hands

Asking her to just tell him what it means

that he can longer read French (as I flip the tent stake

Mallet around and around, leav

ing bruises in the ground, wondering if it is God  or my child I should apologize to-)

 

I write tiny poems on the backs of his dirty toes

Odes to my dead father and Jerry Garcia

Jerry, someone once told me, drove a Beamer

As he beep beeped out of my drive

Way into the horizon like an Icarus in a silver bullet

Chariot master

Pieces of himself burning alive to be Matisse’d for as many years as there are

Hearts

A demon boxed inside blue exploding all over the page

Onto

me & on

toyou