Monday, January 23, 2006

Straight Eight

I guess Ginsberg and like that
are maybe out there howling still
from their places in the pantheon
somewhere in the nevernever beyond
(and who knew at the time that they too
would join in it their own good time?)
but really, the beats are dead
and it's a damn shame because
I would've liked just once
to stack strung-together words
onto endless taped-together teletype rolls
into unpunctuated poems that read out loud
sound like vast syncopated train wrecks
at the moment of maximum mangled beauty
typing furiously on a used portable Smith-Corona
wrapped up in the dusty gleaming womb
of the back seat of a Packard straight eight
cacophony of differential bearings wailing harmony
atop the thumping bass mains of the overheated motor
in a headlong mad coast-to-coast charge
urgent but for destination and direction
with Moriarty hunched over the steering wheel
riffing on espresso amphetamine and Night Train
and the holy flow of his own spoken soundtrack
constant spilling hipster stream of consciousness
scatting free atop the clattering counterpoint
of the erratic erotic eight-to-the-broken-bar
jazz clattering of the typewriter.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was about to say, "Once a j&^%$&*%t," always a ..." But then I thought, "Once a m*&%^^*(&n, always a ..."

You're displaying your past; do you want to?

coyote said...

Which of my multiple past lives are we talking about here, Nonny? Hmmm. No, only displaying my past if I'm channelling Jack Kerouac better than i think I am. He allegedly typed On the Road on teletype rolls (Although some reports say he just taped together sheets of plain old bond) And the coast-to-coast Packard dash was lifted from either that book, or Dharma Bums -- I forget. But whatever. I've never been in a Packard in my life. They stopped building 'em way before I was born....