Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922. Today is his Centenary, just as March 12, 2072 will be his Sesquicentennial Year. We have fancy names for points on our number lines.

I am not too strapped for time, but I am leaving part of my page-image unfilled-in. Call it Compositional Whim, or call it Laziness, just don’t call it late for lunch. (Inside American joke there.)

But the poem will exist complete as soon as I codify it below:

Nick Nack Kerouac’s

New Waves of change, of Parry & Attack
Irreverence as tasty as Shad Roe
Concocting journey’s chapters of a slacker
Keelhauling preconceptions to & fro
Now we must fit the Bride to her Trousseau
And mark when Heads called Marijuana Tea
Concluding that this Beat who’d reached High C
Knew habits that are Bird’s as well as Bee’s

Here are some facts, fun and less so, about Jack Kerouac. Though he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he spoke nothing but French till he was 6 or so due to his immigrant parents, and it took him till 11 or so to lose his French-Canadian accent. (Tip of the hat to my French-Canadian friend Michel Lamontagne!!) His birth name was Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, which has an odd resonance with Hercule-Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac of legend. He wrote his famous novel-but-not On the Road on a single, enormously long sheet of uncut typing paper. A movie called Heart Beat loosely adapted from his reality was made in the early 80s, starring John Heard, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, and a manic Jeff Goldblum as the guy who was supposed to be Allen Ginsberg. Kurt Vonnegut wrote this about him: “I knew Kerouac only at the end of his life, which is to say there was no way for me to know him at all, since he had become a pinwheel. He had settled briefly on Cape Cod, and a mutual friend, the writer Robert Boles, brought him over to my house one night. I doubt that Kerouac knew anything about me or my work, or even where he was. He was crazy.”

I read On the Road in my early 20s, when I was still involved with my college sweetheart, and I still had romantic notions that made On the Road as enticing as catnip to a cat. It was a good, quick read, but I remember little except the reference to Fort Lowell near Tucson, and a description of steak and milk as a “protein feast.” I bought The Dharma Bums but do not remember a word of it besides the title. (How Time withers the Mind!!)

But the title did come in handy today. My poet friend Richard Davis Facebook-posted a Happy Birthday to Kerouac, and in minutes this pastiche came to me:

This old man
He was Beat
On the Road and on the street
With a trick knack
Kerouac
Was and now becomes
Saintly
To us
Dharma Bums.

Happy Birthday, Jack, however you are.

PS: The late Harry Dean Stanton would have been perfect for the role of Jack Kerouac, I think.