PLACES

Apple (The Ambiguous Image)

The runic fruit of this office

Trips me to relive how ravishing

Was that first kiss.

And now, how ravaging.

Sure, the first bite was delicious,

Into the ripening flesh.

Honeyed and pulpaceous,

Brainy and erogenous.

Time accelerated.

Distance collapsed.

Taboos evaporated

By this silicon Cyclops.

Now all sex within reach!

Now all music on pods!

Now all knowledge dirt cheap,

Now all truth up for grabs.

Once we drowned starlight and moon

With shabby incandescence,

We foresook the fixed sky for a screen

Of neverending obsolescence.

But now, in this waiting room

Orbited by nurses,

I look at the bitten half-moon

And poof, the image reverses.

(sesreveR)

- Like the profile of the girl

That turns into the hag’s face.

- Or the nauseous whirl

Of Shroeder’s staircase.

It’s not a bite. It’s a maw.

Not a dent. The abyss.

And not a stem. A chainsaw,

Leveled at the tree of knowingness.

All along a switcheroo.

All along the deepest fake.

That even swastika or boogaloo

Beside this invasive apple, quake.

Places

They are all in their places.

The man who is strikingly young.

The man who is not yet old.

The woman who is too young.

The dog that is racing through time.

The globe that is ancient.

They are silent for the moment.

Dinner and conversation

And the fullness of their time together,

Digesting. Word-gathering.

They are all going places.

The young man has a ticket

To any place you can name.

But he is in no hurry.

He has never been in a hurry,

Which earned him the ticket.

The plane to where everything happens

Will leave when he’s ready,

Not the other way around.

The man who is not yet old

Is traveling too,

At the speed of chiaroscuro light into this canvas.

He has always been in this hurry.

Now he finds himself in the place

He’s always been rushing to.

He turns every brush stroke of this miniature

Into memory and words,

So it will last a while longer.

The woman who is too young

Is going home.

Earlier and earlier into her girlhood.

She is radiant and wistful,

Like a watercolor slowly fading.

Look no further

Than the dog that is racing through time

To see how replete is this place.

He, the athlete and savant of his kind,

Is with the utmost restraint

Dozing at feet, and nibbling at a squeak toy.

He gives himself as fiercely as one person to the other,

Though his time is shorter.

He is going places lying still.

Too fast, too soon.

The globe that is ancient

With USSR and other curios

Once spun for a honeymoon.

Of the thousand artefacts

That propelled us to these places,

It alone survives.

Gaze upon this scene.
These people, this dog,

This miniature prelapsarian world.

This kinship that weathers

Any lapse in conversation.

You may see everything you could ask for

And how precarious it is.

Soon the young man boards the plane to everywhere.

The man has become old.

The woman impossibly young.

A terrible empty place yawns under the table.

All that remains of what you may ever want

Is a hazy watercolor of words.

And this globe that speaks

How sacrosanct lines have blurred.

A Walk Up Russian Hill

I’m consumed by sex.

How Amazonian it is.

How Everest-like.

My life’s a base camp

For that stormy push to the summit.

How strange, then,

To be distracted by scrollwork?

Gingerbread eaves?

A baluster here, a bay window there?

Green Street veers, vertiginously.

But her cottages climb serenely.

Filigreed by ivy,
Bejewelled by stained glass.

Matronly in their pastel robes,

And great-aunt’s cologne of garlic and tomato

In the bay-flecked air.

Halfway up I break a sweat

In the presence of these ladies,

More elegant by the block.

Now with turrets and bay towers.

Divorcèes and heiresses

Glistening like mimosas

In their eternal soirèe.

Take me back to your Victorian girlhoods,

When this cur had a muzzle.

Or at least discretion and ceremony.

And all those gingerbread evasions.

It is altogether too much.

This monomania

Of genitalia and such.

This fever needs to break,

At least for one night.

We will drink my bottle of cheap white.

I will be your Gabriel Oak,

You my Bathsheba Everdene.

In our unrushed twinning

Of selves before lips.

Breathless at the summit of Green Street

I press the buzzer for 132.

And there you are, blonde ringlets damp.

Grinning like a she-wolf,

White bathrobe gaping.

The Ninth Beatitude of Jan Kerouac

Jan’s having a moment.

Next to Jack’s mass roadgoing movement,

It’s chump change.

Like the fifty-two bucks the “famous wino”

Coughed up to keep her in resplendent squalor.

Tenement kitchens swimming in sewage,

Schools like the green intestines of insects

Streets with the heartbeat of manhole covers,

KA LUNK, KA DUNK.

The air saturated with tropical music

And the pomade of the switchblade-thin boys

In their tight cuffed jeans and cockroach killers,

Sizing up every passing car and ass

For what they could chop in a Nuyorican minute.

Punkette prodigy of the Lower East Side

The teeming subcontinent of Manhattan,

Drop-jawing the dopeheads

In her pencil skirt and rat-stabbers,

And that uncanniest likeness

Like nature’s ironclad paternity test.

Put bangs on Jack and he’s Jan.

Acid at twelve.

Bellevue at thirteen.

The series of hilariously grim

Juvie halls ruled by imperious dykes.

“Who’s nex’ foh asskicks?”

Busting out was always the best drug,

Free to boondoggle down the underbelly streets,

Shoot up whatever whenever

Fall for every charismatic prick

The full-of-himself writer, the hustler hash dealer,

Pregnant at fourteen.

And now she hotwires the hemisphere,

Lighting out for America’s subcontinents,

Where things get darker faster.

But in her skip-to-ma-lou telling of it

Every word a wink and a wildchild

She is having a blast

Like a nine-lived alleycat

In a barrio awash with rats.

Stillbirth in Mexico.

Child bride in Oregon.

From waiting tables at old La Fonda

To mucking out horse stalls in Albuquerque

To go-go shaking under the bleary lights,

“I toiled gladly all day like a good mortal should.”

From pampered political call-girl in Santa Fe

To doing tricks out of a trailer in Phoenix,

Just more screwball misadventures

Of the “gumwrapper in a whirlwind” girl.

Hell, she even shrugged off junk now and then,

Like another dancing gig in a roadhouse.

She chalked it all up in skipping prose

And giddy imagery, that makes the wino

Seem repressed and baroque.

The father always shrouding and embellishing

The daughter took a flame-thrower to all that.

Freefalling, “down, down, down” into America’s sub-basement

And the abyss of machismo-addled pricks,

Pushing sex and the road to its wildest extremes

Undreamed by her father and his pantheonic pals

Except for Burroughs who, wasted in Mexico City,

Shot his wife in the forehead.

And so in Peru, Jan found Miguel, the morose Argentinian

Full of raging demons that could only be mollified by blood.

Irredeemably fated to stab her to death.

“Miguel seemed to be nearing a catharsis,

His changes were coming closer together,
Like a woman’s labor pains.”

There, way down on Rio Perené the knife unsheathed

She reached all the way down into her visionary dumb luck

And found a single seat in a river bus to leap into,

Free once more.

Just like junk, she swatted away another killer

Like some drunk’s fumbling hand at the go-go pit.

Along came Marcia Theresa de Zaragoza in Lima

And her cavernous, crucifix-filled hacienda.

Blind, she couldn’t see the mirror of her father

Like everyone else in Jan’s face.

But sized up her frank and generous soul

Like no pimp or publisher or critic ever did,

And took her in like a daughter.

Becalmed and unjudged for once in her life

And stirred by a purified form of grand-mère’s faith

Almost turned Jan’s head.

Almost clad her in white.

Then the road hit her blood like another fix of junk

And she was gone, northbound this time.

Along the way she gave us the sorriest silliest

Portrait of a lionized writer.

A reveal like Toto yanking back the wizard’s curtain.

Here he was, the Father of the Beats

Just another beerbelly slob watching the Beverly Hillbillies

Suckling whiskey from a glass nipple.

Yelling at everyone to turn down the sound

Though he himself was one foot from the TV.

While Gabrielle, the mother who emasculated

His fatherhood with her religion,

Stewed in a wheelchair in a corner.

Jan put it all down in her contact-high words

That didn’t dent the monolithic myth of the Beats.

Critics voyeuristically lapped up the sleaze,

Then fig-leafed their bonafides with the word “picaresque.”

As if her novels were overstuffed travelogues.

Not rapturous, whimsical soul-barings like few others.

One, a woman even, trafficked the shibboleth

That they were “works of unrequited love.”

A daughter hitting the prickly road to find her father.

But wouldn’t it be juicier the other way around . . .

Hey, Jack. Yes, you. Mind us turning down Jed and Jethro and Elly May there, on your eternal bender in the sky? Well, doggies!

It’s us. All of us. Long time coming, a re-read of your big breakout, the passage that put you on the map. Ready? Can your whiskey bottle-brittle ego take it? Here goes:

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier sensing all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it . . . I think of the charismatic jerk Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the stumblebum father we never found, to my everlasting shame and crazed misjudgement I think of Dean Moriarty, one more Miguel in the swaggering psychotic spectrum of men, when I should be raptly thinking of my angelically openhearted flesh and blood, Jan Kerouac, who got only fifty-two bucks of fame next to my millions, yet stupidly I think of Dean Moriarty.”

Author’s notes: Jan Kerouac (1952-1996) was born as her father reworked On The Road for publication. Her first novel, Baby Driver, was republished in November 2025 after decades out of print.

The 120-foot scroll for Jack Kerouac’s first draft of On The Road sold for $2.43 million in 2001.

The Ninth Beatitude (secularized): Blissed-out are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because you dare to be your authentic self. Thank your lucky stars and be glad, for your reward is great in whatever afterlife there may be. So read her book

Craig Constantine has been a day laborer, bread baker, furniture mover, factory worker, and TV producer. Now a poet, the hardest, worst-paid, best job he’s had. His poems are drifting like his younger self, now in the UK, now in the US, now in Australia. He lives with in LA with his wife Stacey and son Chris in a haunted house, along with Cody the Border Collie, numerous koi fish, and a family of owls.