The Lost Ballads of Jack Kerouac

by John C. Goodman

Do want to know what Dharma really is?
It’s a dead-weight fucked-up minibus full of trouble.
It is the nowhere that is everywhere.
It is everything you can’t think about in the cathode night
when the hound-dog howls of uncertainty blast your inner ears
with cries of compassion
and two orders of corned-beef-on-rye
            - one with mustard
            - one without
when we crashed into
Lou’s “We Never Close” Deli
drunk and disorderly
pissing into the wind
like highschool boys afraid to ask the girls to dance
waltzing crabwise into serious situations
where it’s either cut and run
or fight it out with shadows and desperation

- either way you lose -

and spent the rest of the night looking for the
The Lost Ballads of Jack Kerouac
in junkie alleys
and half finished bottles of rye
trash cans echoing on divine concrete
like timpani
in an orchestra that gave up on Brahms in the middle of a serenade
and launched into John Coltrane
or some other fatal-eyed lavender misfit on a short trip to ecstasy
in dingy stairwells lit by burned-out misery
reeking of the last forlorn insurance salesman’s pitch

and we’re all here together in the straightjacket night
trading worthless intentions for whatever we can get
riding trains past the ends of all lines
into deeper realities
than even the Dharma bums imagined
until the first faint miasma of the pollution haze dawn
strips the city of its mystery
and in the final graffiti-littered light
lays our Desire
in the soft caress of Eternity
where it belongs.

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~ This piece was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 and was filed under Writing, Poetry. You can make comments on it below. ~