Jack Kerouac's Grave

I wanted to see
Jack Kerouac's grave
Because I feel
So close to him.
I read his books in the fifties
And I followed his path in the sixties.
But look again
In Google maps
At the photo taken
flying over his grave
Considering, perhaps
That the reality
Might be less than idolatry.
Hundreds of evenly placed stones
All around him, so much alike
Though she had spit curls
And those are real pearls
That she's buried with
That guy had a Harley
And rode it with pride
Til the day that his luck ran out and he died.
And it went on like that
Hundreds of times,
Mostly good people
Some condemned for their crimes.
But here at the cemetery
On Third Street in Lowell
Marking the place
Where a box full of bones
Might last for a hundred years and a day
Til it becomes a handy mat
For a high-rise of flats
And collapses into the clay.
It waits there, quietly below
For millions of years, maybe more
Until a brilliant
And much admired fox
Whose kind arose from the deadly debris
Re-invented paleontology
And studied ancient biology
Of a type with a strange little shell like a box.
And one day, sifting through a rock bed,
The fox found Jack Kerouac's head.
It was determined to belong
to a tortoise, long gone.