‘Fuck being a dirty word that comes out clean’

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums  

 

 

Kerouac writes like Hemingway

at the opening of The Dharma Bums,

it’s all there, jumping on a freight train

out of Los Angeles, his relish at sharing

his bread and cheese and wine

with an old hobo in the boxcar.

 

Reading passages from On The Road on TV

to a gentle jazz accompaniment,  

he looks like a Hollywood movie star.

 

I can remember when I abandoned

Virginia Woolf for Jack Kerouac.

And never looked back.