What Rusts In The Rain: For The Memory Of William S. Burroughs Poem by Romella Kitchens

What Rusts In The Rain: For The Memory Of William S. Burroughs



What Rusts In The Rain
(For The Memory Of William S. Burroughs & Typewriters)

It is Lawrence, Kansas and the sky opens
up as if a doppelganger of all mothers and wombs
Leaving out rain as milk from its breasts onto
all things fertile
Rangas of storm
A writer adores their typewriter.
They name it and ache in its lack of health and death.
Brother, the decades faded and the Beats and the Hippies
their dawns edges burning off in the sunlight of time
took flight on dusky dirges and are gone.
Generations come and go and that none of us can turn in protest against, too busy in our living and then our leaving.
Opiate, apt fruition.

There is no lover like a typewriter.
Stroke its keys.
Know its response.

Kansas, Dorothy's head all turned around and paisley.
You died and they left your typewriter in the backyard
of your last home, grass growing up into its spine.
No more pawning for what the soul was too terrified to
go without.
Maybe it is better here.
Waiting for the return of some living, freed dignity.
An ability to grow creative legs, talk again.
The scent of English Ovals on its skin

POET'S NOTES ABOUT THE POEM
William S. Burroughs was a Beat Era writer. He was one of a select group of male writers who coupled, supported each other in terms of writing and traveled, searched. The story of his typewriter being left in the rain is true. The poet feels no one else could write as Burroughs wrote thus it may stand sentry.
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Romella Kitchens

Romella Kitchens

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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