Posted by Atticus on August 24, 2005, at 13:24:20
Gliding Down Flaking Blacktop Ballroom Floors
Electric eclectic epileptic addicts
Stand twitching in the crumbling frames
Of brownstone doorways,
Eyes etched with ruby-red veins
That read like the entangled vines
Of knowledge encoded in ratty roadmaps
That have been folded and unfolded
Far too many times
In panicked attempts to find
A way back to the promised land,
To Route 66, to Kerouac’s mythic
Metaphor for journeys
Without beginning
Without end
Without purpose
Without meaning
The Triple-A distillation of the American dream
Of forward motion
Without a plan of action,
Of gliding down flaking blacktop ballroom
Floors cracked and crumbling
Under a desert sky’s merciless
Beautifully blue assault
As a chrome-accented Astaire
And a pulsing V-8 Rogers
Twirl like Detroit dust devils,
Celluloid fantasy rendered
In the shimmering blast
Of molten steel madness,
Of tail-finned fanaticism and fatalism,
Of the ozone-scented bursts
Of staccato spark-plug percussion
As they seek and weep,
Amid the cries of creaking suspension,
For a place that’s anywhere but here,
For a time that’s any time but now.
poster:Atticus
thread:546057
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050807/msgs/546057.html