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Callaloo 25.1 (2002) 217



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Beat

James E. Cherry


Kerouac ordered toast and coffee. Black.
When he finished, you tossed your apron
upon the floor of the LA Hilton, walked out
of its doors, northward, giving no one a two
weeks notice; Jack didn't even leave a tip.
Feet calloused, broke and hungry, you feasted
on the poetry, music, dance, art of a North
beach community overflowing with thought
and freedom, a renaissance of love and flowers.
Carrying your son Parker around like a bebop
tune into coffeehouses, you bumped into Ginsberg
and Corso, while breathing your poems, the air
thick with surrealism, palpitating with change.
While others protested the war by burning govern
ment cards, clashing with the gestapo or fleeing
for borders, you detonated Abomunist Manifestos,
threw silence like a molotov cocktail. John F
Kennedy had long since left Dallas by then.
Ten years later it was over, our troops battered,
broken and beaten had returned to thankless,
inimical soil as you sat in the San Francisco Bay
looking at the horizon where the world ends,
anxiously anticipating all of those ships that
never sailed to appear over the edge of the ocean.


 

James E. Cherry is a poet and a fiction writer residing in Tennessee. His works have been featured in Curious Rooms, Stolen Island Review, Bma: Sonia Sanchez Journal, Sauti Mypa, Sarasota Review, and Illuminations. Presently, he has poems in the anthologies Bum Rush the Page (Crown) and Roll Call (Third World Press). He is the founder of The Griot Collective, a poetry workshop.

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