Lay for the Day21st October

Jack Kerouac died on this day in 1969.

A section from the second part of Eye City:

Ah, that deep-throated American taste
For surfeit, waste and self-destruction,
For the sun like a pizza setting
Behind the industrial thicket
And night-purée roiling on the sea.

The pioneer’s heart burst into flames,
Whose ash in lines the backward breeze makes
Waver on the page of a novel
And soles crunch on the lakeside cinder path;
Whose heat goes nowhere, whose light goes home.

No sky-blue-pink berry tops the rise.
The bush is clogged with man-size tissue.
If Huck Finn had lived he’d have taught us
The worth of an elder’s crown, downcast.

John Gibbens
from Eye City

The Lay Reader: an archive of the poetic calendar