Five Day Romance
by Michael Simons

Oh Kerouac      the whisper in my ear
how unfair!
Making my innocent stasis
feel like Caliban savagery.      Drop the books,
                                                       hit the road.
Spent days
thumbing it.
Till a girl
with a smile,
lighter and kinder
than oxygen,
picked me up.

Where you heading?
-West… I think. Yourself?
She wasn’t sure either.

The radiant foliage
bloomed;
so did the conversation.
But after
a few hours
the hopeless foliage
had exhausted her.

She dropped me off
at a truck stop;
where an obese truck driver
gave me a lift
and offered to share
his cocaine.

Michael Simons is currently living in Cambridge and studying English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.