reading Life magazine

i thought of Jack

and the long, shining road

from here to there and everywhere

in between the covers

of Dylan's albums and the

rhythmic chants of Alan

heard softly across the academic streets of Boulder,  Colorado.

Jack was smoking with his clicking typewriter

while his brain jetted to San Francisco

and Kansas City looking for a body double

before calling it a day or two

but he never saw the sun setting over the far horizon.

Neal was speeding

rapidly shifting gears on the fast highway to hell,

bouncing the Merry Prankster bus up and down canyon walls,

without nautical maps, 

off the charts,

tossing Jack and his typewriter into the frothy sea

like a drunken merchant marine in an after-curfew bar brawl.

they were on a scroll, so to speak.

and they ended up in Denver without a dime bag or a nickel,

hoping to be published and make a quick buck.

they went looking for fantastic drugs,

looking for wild adventures;

they went looking for multiple fucks with almost anyone willing.

and when they found Burroughs, 

the real shit hit the fan

his guns exploded in pornographic rage,

savagely insulting J Edgar and the FBI,

and civil moms and clean-shaven pops,

mocking convention and Arizona Barry Goldwater minions,

and then someone was suddenly murdered near Mexico City:

a needle was found in her head,

but they swore it couldn't have been them, being in Denver

and all.

Alan folded his legs in a crowded room of smiling acolytes 

somewhere up north, he remembered later,

writing about his past transgressions with Gregory and the

pantless races they ran, down tenement halls and into the

wilds of a sultry northern Africa night, 

flinging open closet doors to discover starry bliss.

Alan almost died in Boulder, too full of himself,

maximizing

time 

meditating inside an endless moment

but he took a deep breath before exhaling,

held on to it, 

survived.

Jack grew fat drinking himself into history, with his mother by his side.

Neal went to sleep and stayed quiet once and for all.

Burroughs loved his cats to death, but never wasted an ounce

of heroin on anyone but himself.  

the cats used their litter box and so did he.  

His book, Naked Lunch, 

was a scandal only to the people of polite society.

they claimed not to have read it,

instead reading 

Life magazine, 

searching for a life.