In honor of the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s “death-day” departure for roads unknown.

When I was a young man,

a budding scribe

eager to blossom white fire,

and scabbed lotuses,

you meant the world to me.

You exposed me to velocity bop

and piggyback rhythms,

to applepie windowsill jazz

and summerlight porchswings,

to mesmeric wreaths of pipesmoke

and the windswept skulls

of railroad Octobers

in brown, turning earth.

You souleased

in such a relatable way,

the freight of boyhood

infused your eyes

with saloony verve,

your fingers jitterbugged

across enormous swaths of whiteness

and void,

you bootlegged

lyrics

Melville-style,

just to keep yourself

in the running with

Hemingway’s bulls

and Joyce’s Dublin,

whitewhale hunting

came second nature to you,

some people do impossible

like half-made angels

leveled by mortal booms.

Their very gimpness

embodies

the purest translation

of Heaven’s perishable blooms.

Yours

was the religion

of sweet, sad farewells,

the capered goofs

of littleboys spitballing

I love yous

to girls in pinafore dresses

at Sunday movie matinees,

or profane leerstruckness

at the silver crucifixes

resting

between ripening mounds

of sweatbeaded cleavage,

yours

was the racket of vaudeville,

commingled with a fanatic’s

fairground zeal,

the Zen weatherman

who once proclaimed:

The taste

of rain—

why kneel?

Yet

it wasn’t long

before

Fame,

that highly-sought-after

stalk-legged

dame

in a mink stole

and whitehot spray

of jewels

came along

and cornered you good,

and the Shakespeare of Lowell

quickly became

Little Boy Blue,

nowhere to turn,

as the flesheaters

closed in,

and all you could do

was blow wild, careening

solos through your trusty horn,

and pour

rivers of whiskey

over your soul’s

godgiven.

Recognition didn’t kill you,

alcoholism did,

but let’s just say

recognition

mixed with booze

in the redlight district

and pinkened sensitivity

of wounded souls

sharpens

and humors itself

through the gallows.

When names

balloon too big,

when the print is lettered

through the Hypemachine,

it is easy

to lose sight

of what it is we’re reading,

Fame’s overlay

the distorting veneer

so you are no longer reading

what you see or feel

but rather what you’ve heard

from a hivemind,

secondhand rumors dispel

direct engagement with mystery,

what others know

and say

becomes the order of the day,

and that long day’s journey

into night

is, by definition

and default, history

(its winners wearing blinders

while leading the blind)

but before the siege,

and after the deluge,

Jack Kerouac, Ti Jean, Sal Paradise, John Duluouz,

and all the other names that became you,

there were the words, the holy writ,

the godblasted scrolls of one man’s

selfspeak upon the earth,

that rabid seeking

as gilded sibling

to Dylan Thomas’s hilltop cloudcry—

Oh, as I was young once,

and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying,

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

You,

Mr. Kerouac,

were one of the wind-twisting

chain-rattlers,

frothing fringed baubles of sea

at the mouth,

as if to prove

you were nature herself

(this the way of angels, the way of children)

and when I look back,

I am immensely grateful

that you took the time

to give the spirit of boyhood,

its vim and keyturned sorcery,

as well as music’s

plasmic alchemy,

its reverential due

in a society

where doped dreams

register

way too much sleep

to ever claim their meek

as soundly vital

and golden.