Gee our old LaSalle ran great


Cerith Wyn Evans, Don't Be Late, 2006

America
-- by Robert Creeley

America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.

Coming To This
-- by Mark Strand

We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.

And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.
The wine waits.

Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.

Hitchhikers Redux
-- by Dennis Mahagin

I was about to call it a night when my I Mac
channeled Kerouac on brass knuckle Blackberry,
updating his web log from an outpost on Antares:

"It’s awfully like the desert, where nothing’s
as near as it ever appears, or listen--think in
terms perhaps of that particular Time I shot
craps with Pascal when I was but a greenhorn
fresh out of stratosphere-- and I watched him
press and press his hard way bets while I built
up my bank, until Double Fours did blow me
right out of that game like pale pink particle
dust from a sunflower super nova!"

On chat
platform I scrambled to
answer Jack with my cheesy
3-D Pulsar Avatar of Milky
Way Bar--typing on tiny
wing-shaped keypad just
as fast as my fingers
could fly:

"Well other than that, how have you
been getting along, Master Kerouac?"

"Oh man, with gravity in a hermetic
vacuum it’s nothing but zoom-zoom…
zoom – zoom - ZOOM!"

"Are you an angel now, Jack?"

"Heavens no!... but yesterday I
did in fact catch a glimpse of Neal’s
holy snow chin whiskers in the Katherine
Wheel sparks of a Haley’s Sleigh Ride.
And man, what a GAS!"

"So it’s true, we’re not all alone in a vast
coal-black and frigidly-indifferent universe?"

"No, man. Just very, very Self
Centered. That's all... Remember the
most important caveat, which is that
even the most gaping and galloping
of Big Sur fault lines cannot stand up
against a well-wrought rope skip rhyme…
And all addictions, fratricide and bad
tattoos are spawned by boredom."

"Wow, you know I think
this post is gonna draw a whole
lot of Web hits, Jack!"

"That's cool, kid—now, dig, I
gotta fly, but I’ll most likely be
back."

"Until Zen."

"You’re catchin’ on, kid, you
really are comin’along just fine."

"So where to now, Kerouac?"

"Andromeda, dad. Andromeda."