I am not sentimental. I am very sentimental. I’m not easy. I’m very easy.
This morning I’m letting reality weigh itself. I’m very free.
Unlike Jack Kerouac I’m not in a hurry. Maybe that’s because I can’t drive.
(Well, blind people, “can” drive, but it’s not advisable, especially
if we generally like humanity, and I “do” love my odd, dented, still aborning
fellow citizens…)
I’m free…and yes, I’m thinking of Kerouac this morning in particular:
i will write
it, all the talk of the world
everywhere in this morning, leav-
ing open parentheses sections
for my own accompanying inner
thoughts-with roars of me
all brain-all world
roaring-vibrating-I put
it down, swiftly, 1,000 words
(of pages) compressed into one second
of time-I’ll be long
robed & long gold haired in
the famous Greek afternoon
of some Greek City
(from Daydreams for Ginsberg)
Ha! Inner thoughts, with layers of roar—brain that!
Architectonic thoughts, striated, simultaneous, with electrolysis—turn it up!
Fast Greek! Kero-stotle! Naked! Dancing in the Agora! Open parentheses…
Reminds me of the “lecture” (the big one) about the Greeks, back in college, Freshman year.
Old Prof stands, looks at hundreds of students, raises his index finger, sez:
“What’s the first thing Aristotle did in the morning?”
No answer from the students.
“He hiked up his toga and took a piss!”
Students didn’t know if it was OK to laugh.
Kero-stotle, robed & long gold haired in the famous Greek afternoon, takes a pee….
Thinks meantime, 1000 words (of pages) compressed into one second.
Kero-stotle wants to go exceptionally fast.
He thinks time is running out.
Those guys over in Jersey invented the atom bomb.
All world, roaring.
Don’t sit there, so weak minded.
Do the Whitman “thing”—go up on the tenement roof and make barbaric noises.
Even Barbarians had points of view.
Write fast.
Drive faster.
Advantage over old Greeks: automobile.
Pounding, seething across Indiana, telephone poles lifting like they’d been electroshocked.
Poetry has advantages over prose:
It extends your eyelashes.
More feeling, less bloat.
“How do you know you’re alive, Son?”
“Because zig zag lines of lightning pour along my arms, officer.”
Even the Greeks would have had difficulty making sense of Indiana.
Jack Kerouac. A better poet than he was a prose writer:
211th Chorus
The wheel of the quivering meat
conception
Turns in the void expelling human beings,
Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits,
Mice, lice, lizards, rats, roan
Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics,
Horrible unnameable lice of vultures,
Murderous attacking dog-armies
Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the
jungle,
Vast boars and huge gigantic bull
Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,
Pones and Porcupines and Pills-
All the endless conception of living
beings
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in & out,
From supermicroscopic no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one Mind-
Poor!
I wish I was free
of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead.
Poor Jack Kerouac! The body is a prison. His. Ours. And even if you didn’t think so, say, because you love your Ivory Soap, the ten directions of space will finish you off just as surely as the attacking dog-armies…Ach! What a mortal mess. What meat bags we are! All of us. Soap only masks the inevitable. Poor Jack! Gnashing everywhere in consciousness! No respite, no matter where you look in creation! From virus to supernova—everything is excreting from its bowels, what’s an amateur Buddhist, ex-Catholic to do? Play his guitar of course. His blue guitar. “I wish I was free/of that slaving meat wheel/and safe in heaven dead.”
There’s no evidence that “safe” counts in Heaven—one must fairly ask (as Alan Turing did) if consciousness can exist at tall outside the body. You see? Kerouac can’t resist jumping from Buddhism to Catholicism at thinned out edges of his poem.
I love him for that.
I love that he’s just like us.
Blues. Bravado. Wishes. A few lies. Some dreams. And he can make you laugh or cry. All while taking dizzying steps.
Kerouac the poet, writes an elegy for Charley Parker:
241st Chorus
And how sweet a story it is
When you hear Charley Parker
tell it,
Either on records or at sessions,
Or at official bits in clubs,
Shots in the arm for the wallet,
Gleefully he Whistled the
perfect
horn
Anyhow, made no difference.
Charley Parker, forgive me-
Forgive me for not answering your eyes-
For not having made in indication
Of that which you can devise-
Charley Parker, pray for me-
Pray for me and everybody
In the Nirvanas of your brain
Where you hide, indulgent and huge,
No longer Charley Parker
But the secret unsayable name
That carries with it merit
Not to be measured from here
To up, down, east, or west-
-Charley Parker, lay the bane,
off me, and every body
Thank you Jack Kerouac. Thank you for writing ”Nirvanas of your brain”—just the right gift for Charley Parker’s ghost—“merit/Not to be measured from here”. Thank you Jack Kerouac for finally answering Charley Parker’s eyes. Thank you for writing a jazz prayer. Thank you for thinking of a horn player as a secret, unsayable angel. Thank you for praying to his spirit: “lay the bane,/off me, and every body”. Let us be relieved, every one, from the terrors of addiction and money and hungers. And thank you for the tenderness, Jack Kerouac. Maybe it makes no difference but I’m not convinced and neither were you. Thank you for not being convinced.
Oh and you were dirty and funny just like us, Jack:
Hitchhiker
Tryna get to sunny Californy’ –
Boom. It’s the awful raincoat
making me look like a selfdefeated self-murdering imaginary gangster, an idiot in a rueful coat, how can they understand my damp packs – my mud packs –
„Look John, a hitchhiker’
„He looks like he’s got a gun underneath that I. R. A. coat’
‘Look Fred, that man by the road’ „Some sexfiend got in print in 1938 in Sex Magazine’ –
„You found his blue corpse in a greenshade edition, with axe blots’
I’ve hitchhiked some. Blind. Walking dizzying steps of days and nights in America’s liminal spaces, half in, half out of culture, twisting by the side of the road. It’s a liberated vagrancy.
Boom. They drive right past. “I wouldn’t want to ride with you anyway…”
Jack, America, properly, at its best, was always shabby. (How Lewis and Clark must have stank!)
Thank you for your Haikus:
Haiku (The low yellow…)
The low yellow
moon above the
Quiet lamplit house.
**
Haiku
Birds singing
in the dark
—Rainy dawn
**
Early morning gentle rain,
two big bumblebees
Humming at their work
**
Bluejay drinking at my
saucer of milk,
Throwing his head back
**
Men and women
Yakking beneath
the eternal void
**
In my medicine cabinet
the winter fly
has died of old age
**
Shall I break God’s commandment?
Little fly
Rubbing its back legs
**
My pipe unlit
beside the Diamond
Sutra – what to think?
**
Early morning yellow flowers,
thinking about
the drunkards of Mexico.
**
No telegram today
only more leaves
fell.
**
Nightfall,
boy smashing dandelions
with a stick.
**
Holding up my
purring cat to the moon
I sighed.
**
Drunk as a hoot owl,
writing letters
by thunderstorm.
**
Empty baseball field
a robin
hops along the bench.
**
All day long
wearing a hat
that wasn’t on my head.
**
Crossing the football field
coming home from work –
the lonely businessman.
**
After the shower
among the drenched roses
the bird thrashing in the bath.
**
Snap your finger
stop the world –
rain falls harder.
**
Nightfall,
too dark to read the page
too cold.
**
Following each other
my cats stop
when it thunders.
**
Wash hung out
by moonlight
Friday night in May.
**
The bottoms of my shoes
are clean
from walking in the rain.
**
Glow worm
sleeping on this flower –
your light’s on.
**
Thank you Jack Kerouac. For allowing your journeys to visit me. For saying there is nothing to be astonished about; there is everything to be astonished about.
For saying we can try out a hundred masks, then throw them all away before the void.
For daring to be the schoolboy who delightedly writes and rewrites misspelled word.
I like you better when you’re not in a car. You were a fine poet who got lured into prose. I think the skyscrapers hurt you.
I like you better when you stand before your bathroom mirror.
I like you better when you express your feelings with a broken pencil.
I am not sentimental. I am very sentimental. I’m not easy. I’m very easy.
This morning I’m letting reality weigh itself. I’m very free.