Jack Kerouac
I used to write like
Jack Kerouac.
Words
crumbling down
paper.
Stark thoughts
marked
by dots
and dashes.
Flashes of schoolyard brilliance
The hill I would
climb over
to be
someone different.
I never saw life
through a dot.
LSD.
My father
was on mushrooms,
when he and my mother
created me.
Psychedelic sperm
meets
bitter weed
infested ovum.
BANGED
into existence.
Transient spirit
sloughing off
afterbirth long
after I hit
the cold.
I have chased
paper
ever since.
Dipping my bones
in ink.
To paint a
masterpiece
of you.
Broken, homeless, loveless,
privileged, safe, warm,
sheltered, shattered
reconstructed.
All in a backdrop
of perfection.
An abundant Earth
housing an
ungrateful patient.
Most of us,
doctored
unconscious
sedated.
Waiting for
something
to wake us
up.
My own words
often
broken and
falling off.
Leaving only
snapshots.
I get ties and
sketches
along the
road.
I would bargain
my dreams
for pious acceptance
and my revelations
for wicked
indulgent
self
flagellation.
I have been
bound to my
vision
of exclusion
behind an
iron fence of
history.
Trapped
in pages.
Tapped and
wasted.
I used to write
as if I didn't
I would die.
On my knees
shattered
under
that perfect
silent sky.
Head bowed
shoulders cowed
frail and pasty.
Screaming
raging
breaking pages
with my pen.
Attempting to bring
black and white
to color.
Now I write,
because
I die.
A thousand times
with you.
Its glorious!
Over your
unfinished portraits.
Your shortcuts
your detours
your ache
your lust,
and your mindless
wandering.
Beautiful
and championed.
I pray to make
my prose like
a Sistine Chapel
after all,
you deserve
it!
Only to fall
very far from
grace.
At the
Inadequacy
I have
at coloring
your face.
I used to write
like Jack Kerouac,
jotting a shot
of you
in between
heaven.
But I figured out
that I would
rather capture
my own
splinter.
And be satisfied with
a sliver of you,
than die like him
at forty-seven.
Copyright © Sarah Wheeler | Year Posted 2015
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