Here I Dreamt

I dreamt I was in Kerouac’s New York and met Kerouac’s Kerouac.

He thought I had a job somewhere frying chicken ‘cause I had grease on my pants

and I didn’t correct him. He told me I had a tongue loose with truth

and that he liked my right use of the shambled word caterwaul.

He quoted me a verse of Tennyson I don’t myself know

and we slammed a brown bag of beer together.

In the dream I'd woke and found myself in that New York and knew it immediately.

I heard a man on the street talking in cadence that touched me and I could hear its music.

Jack walked by and I instinctively knew he’d want to know.

I told him people spoke with accidental poetry better than poets

and I sang the man’s words to him in the tune of Gene Kelley’s Broadway Melody

and Jack Said he loved that song.

I told him I was a time traveler and he asked me about the future.

I said I only knew the future as well as a hooky-playing schoolboy knows the past

and that all I could say for sure was that the bomb doesn’t happen but the computer does.

America wins the cold war but not its soul and that the world slowly loses its poetry as people talk less.

© 2011 Yorgo Douramacos