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Where is the road?
Cyrus Avery’s ribbon of dreams
That ran away from Chicago to the Pacific Ocean to connect the Mid-West and the Promised land.
A concrete artery for the American Dream
For the automobile for the restless traveler
Where is the road that wouldn’t die
In 1977 when they took down the last highway Sign and thought it would just go away,
But it wouldn’t just go away.
It wasn’t just a road Cyrus Avery's ribbon of Dreams, It was Pop Hicks Diner with
Howard and Mary Nichols In Clinton Oklahoma
Where the heart beat of what John Steinbeck
Called the Mother Road
Was heard over the sound of coffee cups
Knocking against plates of Spanish Omelettes
And home fries
Where is the Road that Tom Joad traveled west
From Oklahoma with his family
And tethered mattresses in the
Grapes of Wrath.
Where Ernest Hemingway sat and sipped wine
In the Villa Cuberto in Albuqerque New Mexico
Where he wrote The Old Man and The Sea.
Where is the road that refused to die,
As the signs saying Route 66 began to Reappear on the sides of buildings, shops and Sheds as if by magic.
As if Route 66 signs that appeared painted
On the very concrete itself were a kind of
Stigmata of the American dream.
Where Will Rogers once stood in the Coleman Theatre in Miami Oklahoma
And re-defined the image of a country
With a reality check that long outlived
Even Rogers himself. as the road became Known as The Will Rogers Highway.
And the Coleman Theatre still stands beside 66
With an ornate style that screams "I am alive"
Against the Oklahoma horizon
Where is the road where Stanley Marsh planted
Ten Cadillacs in the ground outside Amarillo Texas and Cadillac Ranch
Became visual rock and roll.
The road runs from Tucumcari
To Flagstaff, through Meteor City and Winslow Arizona with the line of a spider vein on the Thigh of a runway dancer.
The road cuts through the Mohave Desert
Where sidewinders find the shade
In the shadows of abandoned oldsmobiles
Bleached into rusted skeletons
Like those that lie beneath the
White hot sand of Americas highway.
Then it’s Azusa, Pasadena and Pomona
Where harness horses walk under wool
Blankets in endless circles at the L.A. County Fairgrounds and the solid air of Los Angeles Hangs like the smoke of a
Hollywood Hills pot party
Over the fading walls of the Miracle Mile.
Where is the road that stops at the Santa Monica Pier Where Crips and Bloods strut their Territory over weather boards that still shake The feet of tourists and the sound of a carousel Spinning it’s innocence in what’s left of the Promised Land.
Where is the road?
I must find out.
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