We had to talk about Kerouac at some point on the podcast. This being the second weekend I’ve dragged four wheels and my sleepy ass up and back to Detroit, I figured it was time. Here’s two haiku and a passage from “October in the Railroad Earth” Okay here’s a poem I wrote during my senior year manuscript project at Otterbein, too.
December in the Railroad Earth
The sharp reflections of the moon
glimmering on the unsure surface of the bay
are caught in the groovy disco-ball reflection of a
secondhand store’s mannequin’s fake crystal
earring (fat breasted, big boned)
sitting underneath Oakland’s unfashionable headdress,
is San Francisco.
Before you can lift her skirt to kiss her thighs
below the Bay Bridge in the shadow of SFO
where the breeze in eyes isn’t from the water,
isn’t carrying baked goods out of Height Ashbury bakeries
airplane exhaust, honking cars heading headlights first
towards San Jose.
It is cold the next morning.
It is chilly in Chinatown, where squat men open their shops,
small women wield butcher knives the size of their children
chopping the heads off of fresh ocean fish;
so close, so close to the waving cats
and infinite plastic Buddhas muttering mantras,
and at the gate at the corner of Bush and Grant;
its concrete dragons pause to take pictures with tourists jamming their
hands into their pockets.
Other side of town,
North on Van Ness on top of Russian Hill
and its booksellers and old wooden doors and expensive sushi,
a different kind of cold worms its way into the sleeves of a flannel.
For as bright as the sun is in your eyes,
that wind coming off the ocean is worse.
Alcatraz and the rising sun sit alone out over the water,
other parts of mainland California further.
Here is where the railroads stopped pushing West.
Golden Gate Bridge, all red in defiance swings in the morning haze,
water lightly slapping the arm of the pier where
a fish jumps, a bird swoops, spray flies.
All those railroads are obsolete now,
I can fly across the world in a matter of hours.
I have flown across the world in a matter of hours.
You could leave San Francisco for anywhere if you wanted,
sitting in SFO aimlessly waiting for an anonymous airplane
with its own romance etched onto the wings. Sleeping upright
in a seat you can only claim as your bed,
home is the white knuckles hanging on to the armrests,
home is the homeless sleeping in the tunnel on Columbus Avenue,
near your favorite beatnik bookstore.
All your San Francisco will have to fall eventually,
until the promise of new frontier is worn as thin as the
cinder blocks a wrecked and rusted out Plymouth slowly dies on.
That wind, that chill wakes you up again.
The world doesn’t end here friends.
The satin sheets will be waiting when the souls of your shoes
are worn out.
