This is an updated version of a poem that is ultimately a manifesto in progress. Many of my friends (Short brothers this means you) will hate it. To those I speak of: Fuck You, assholes.

Defending Jack
By Ashton Goggans

Because On The Road was the only Bible I ever had
Because of the stars
The dawn, the dusk,
And each stretching inch
From Florida to California,
and whiskey, flasked,
In my coat pocket, alone
Screaming at the sun, falling from empty desert skies,
Confessing and repenting
To those dusk eyes waiting— look at the bleeding sky!


Because grammar is for the birds
Punctuation doesn’t stop the bleeding, you see
Life is a sentence, one gripping sentence, without periods in it
It doesn’t stop for anything
So fuck them, don’t stop, just go go go


You can’t show someone how to set their soul ablaze


Because I was seventeen and I thought my heart would explode
And for three-thousand miles I had him whispering in my ear, pouring
Honey-handed emptiness from the sweet cloudless brilliant sky
Fresh and clean and new,
Look at the fucking sky!
Running from fate, to confusion,
And he said it was "all I have to give"
But It wasn’t,
And It was