Verses on the Jersey Shore

1. Jack Kerouac perched by the surf at Big Sur and lost his mind trying to understand the garbled language of the wide Pacific. I sit at the Atlantic, trying to looooose myself as Jack did and I can only come to a calm reason. The Atlantic is overlooked but here is where we all started on the grainy brown shores of the East where the water rolls in consistent and brackish and saltier than beards.

2. My lofty tones of natural wonderment are disturbed (welcomingly) by throaty calls down the beach:

Fuuuuudgie Wuuuuudgie!

Love your child, buy an ice cream!

A guy about my grandfather's age comes rolling an ice cream cart down the part where the sand is packed hard, between where it's wet and where it's dry, the cart's the kind with the oversized blue plastic wheels and the man wears high white socks with orthopedic tennis shoes.

3. Oh yeah, you know I bought a fudgie wudgie.

4. I remember sitting out here a few summers back, back in high school, reading the Cliff Notes version of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (one of those awful Russian novels where everyone dies) and the man on the lifeguard stand turned out to be a teacher and knew immediately that this must be a summer assignment because what sixteen-year-old suburbanite would want to read Tolstoy in the summer time?

5. The fat kid next to us with a Philly accent is tossing potato chips to the seagulls and all I can think of (4 beers in) are the gulls in Finding Nemo

mine, mine, mine mine, mine

6. Okay, Kerouac, here we go again whoooosh, woooo, kerplash, sash, waaash, wishing, whistling on a limb a while whistle while you work, da do do do do dooo--

7. I tried to loooose myself like Jack again and all I can do is arrive at old Disney movies and so I end up passing out sitting up in my beach chair. Something about the Atlantic won't let me be lost, keeps me from wandering too far inward, keeps me looking outward, but not so far as the horizon, only far enough to point out dolphin fins arcing up and down just past the breakers; to laugh at the dad next to us who let his three sons bury him in the sand and give him a mermaid tail and pointy sand boobs; to grab another beer out of the cooler and arrange the sand with my feet just so; to the blue ink spreading across my page, methodically, logically, steadily as the choppy waves at Cape May.