I Missed the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

I was born four decades tardy
of being a beat generation icon,
375 miles away from Rocky Flats,
a country's span from Lowell, Mass.,
but I can still drink myself to death
when writing "Deliberate Prose",
and have an epitaph carved
with my "Last Words".
I should have been a regular at
Noropa in Boulder
shouted about police states,
and technologies run amok.
The media would have labeled me
"Queen of the Beats", and
I, reveling in that distinction,
might have felt Walt Whitman's
"bear hug of mortality",
before my voice stilled.
Forty years late, I have found my pen.

Bobbie Kilzer Gogain