🌃 Kerouac 🌃 Poem by James McLain

the bar's haze clung to him like old cherry smoke,
Kerouac, drifter, saint of the restless hoards,
his words beat like rain on the green copper roofs,
syncopated, unscripted, unchained.

he lived where the tracks end,
on highways cracked like old men's hands,
each mile a hymn to the wild,
each town a whisper in the lost fading night.

whiskey, jazz, and the ache of it all—
he danced with the angels of America,
falling, soaring, burning—
never landing upright.

Kerouac,
a comet without the night sky.