Table of Contents

PENGUIN POETS

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

FIRST BOOK

PANORAMIC CATALOG SKETCH OF BIG EASONBURG

SECOND BOOK

PENGUIN POETS

PENGUIN POETS

BOOK OF SKETCHES

JACK KEROUAC was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, first published in 1957, that made Kerouac one of the best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac’s books of poetry include Mexico City Blues, Scattered Poems, Pomes All Sizes, Heaven and Other Poems, Book of Blues, and Book of Haikus. Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

GEORGE CONDO is a painter and sculptor who has exhibited extensively in both the United States and Europe, with works in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and many other institutions. In 1999, Condo received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2005 he received the Francis J. Greenberger Award. He is represented by Luhring Augustine in New York, Andrea Caratsch Galley in Zurich, and Sprüth Magers Lee in London.

ALSO BY JACK KEROUAC

THE DULUOZ LEGEND
Visions of Gerard
Doctor Sax
Maggie Cassidy
Vanity of Duluoz
On the Road
Visions of Cody
The Subterraneans
Tristessa
Lonesome Traveller
Desolation Angels
The Dharma Bums
Book of Dreams
Big Sur
Satori in Paris

POETRY
Mexico City Blues
Scattered Poems
Pomes All Sizes
Heaven and Other Poems
Book of Blues
Book of Haikus

OTHER WORK
The Town and the City
The Scripture of Golden
Eternity
Some of the Dharma
Old Angel Midnight
Good Blonde & Others
Pull My Daisy
Trip Trap
Pic
The Portable Jack Kerouac
Selected Letters: 1940-1956
Selected Letters: 1957-1969
Atop an Underwood
Door Wide Open
Orpheus Emerged
Departed Angels
Windblown World
Beat Generation

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First published in Penguin Books 2006

Copyright © John Sampas, Literary Representative,

the Estate of Stella Sampas Kerouac, 2006
Introduction copyright © George Condo, 2006
All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969.

Book of sketches, 1952-53 / Jack Kerouac ; introduction by George Condo. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-0-142-00215-5

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Dedicated to the memory of
Caroline Kerouac Blake

INTRODUCTION

Thoughts about Jack Kerouac

Read this Book of Sketches and you’ll be amazed at what a genius Jack Kerouac was.

These poems just breathe and flow, and when Jack plays the Blues, which he often does, his blues are truly sad — they are sadness without humor, without the joking and backslapping that come from good times. They are the real unfunny truth. Like when his older brother Gerard died. This is one of the saddest poems ever written.

I learned a lot from Jack, and I can say all this not being a writer. At the age of fourteen he was the first radical I ever heard of. When I first became aware that he wrote his novel The Subterraneans in one long stretch, unrevised straight out of his head in three days, and that he had a “steel trap” memory — it was the combination of these two very important factors that inspired a new way of painting for me. From then on I combined memory, speed, and spontaneity to create most of my work. I relied on the Kerouacian notion of “the unrevised method of creation,” and it became the key to a pure uncontrollable mastery of chaos.

As a reader, you would think Kerouac was talking, not writing. Yet it was precisely everyday speech that he was able to conjure up. He, like Jackson Pollock, found a way to take something all of us see and use every day and turn it into Art. This new language of Jack Kerouac was the one we had always been speaking. You just had to know what you were talking about before you spoke.

Jack’s concept of writing was also very art-inspired — he drew on André Masson’s Automatic Painting and Charlie Parker’s informed improvisations to carve out his unique style and destination. He called upon Leonardo da Vinci’s method of observation in his studies of flowers, storms, anatomy, and physiognomy. Jack is to literature what Charlie Parker was to music or Jackson Pollock was to painting. It’s that simple. Proust should be invoked here, too. He must have been one of Kerouac’s favorite writers because he used him to describe Miles Davis’s phrasing in order to enhance a cultural value that had not yet been perceived — he spoke of Miles’s playing “eloquent phrases, just like Marcel Proust.”

To look at Edward Hopper’s paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s is to see the destitute ambience of New York City and its existential paradox — it is a place at once industrious and at the same time empty, lonely, and unanswered. These qualities are found in some of Kerouac’s poetical sketches — gas stations, old barges, oil tankers, silhouettes of a positive industry set against dark empty exteriors that have been forgotten and misplaced: Indian land or an old gold mine, towns at one time prosperous now distinctly gone, reflecting an America that no one wanted to admit was still there.

Jack himself had a cubist take on Hopper — not unlike Joseph Stella’s faceted Brooklyn Bridge — cubist in the sense that the fragmentation is not of imagery but of time and space. The elements of chronology in these sketches are here of no importance. In fact, Jack has made a note, “Not Necessarily Chronological,” this being on his mind — in a larger sense referring to all the poems in the Book of Sketches, but also referring to the sequence of words within each poem. That’s what gives a “sketch” its edge, the fractured, almost “cut-up” feel that the descriptions carry. They seem to be running straight at you and then split up unexpectedly into multiple directions simultaneously, ending on a resolved note somehow related and yet striking out in a new direction.

Unlike Hopper, though, Kerouac did not long for the past — he did not reminisce for the sake of nostalgia — or transpose the European masters’ sensibility. Rather, in the 1950s he broke free and prophetically dreamed a future world of young people wearing Levi’s and being cut loose from all the crumbling conventions. Jack saw into the future, he lived in the future. That is exactly what happened in the 1960s to society, but by then Jack was too old and self-abused to have any pleasure from the world he predicted.

As the sketches tell us, anything that Jack saw was important. Anything that caught his eye and that he wrote about became priceless. Because in the way that an artist like Picasso could see with his brush, Jack could see with his pen. He was able to capture the spirit of his time without making anything up. And as it came to us from nowhere it certainly was astounding how concrete it all is now. It is as if the only true picture of humanity we will ever have was given to us by Jack Kerouac. All else is false and dressed up. Only Jack and Vincent van Gogh told the inner truth.

— George Condo, November 2005

BOOK OF SKETCHES

JACK KEROUAC

Printed Exactly As They Were Written On the Little Pages in the Notebooks I Carried in My Breast Pocket 1952 Summer to 1954 December............

(Not Necessarily Chronological)

FIRST BOOK

Rocky Mt Aug. 7 ’52

Changed now to
dungaree shorts, gaudy
green sandals, blue vest
with white borders & a
little festive lovergirl ribbon
in her hair Carolyn prepares
the supper —
“I better go over there &
fix that lawnmower,” says
Paul standing in the kitchen
with LP at his thigh.
“Supper’ll be ready at
six.”
Glancing at his watch
Paul goes off - to his landlord
Jack up the road — a man his
age, of inherited wealth,
who spends all day in big
Easonburg walking around
or sitting in his vast brick
house (Jacky Lee’s father)

or walking down the road
to see his 2 new cows —
On the kitchen floor is
a pan of dog meal mixed
with milk & water but the
bird dog Bob isnt hungry,
just let out of the pen
he lays greedily sopping
up happy in-house hours
under the d.r. table — a
big affectionate dopey
beauty with great bony
snakehead & big brown eyes
& heartshaped mottled
ears falling like the locks
of a pretty girl do fall —
in the Fall a gliding phantom
in the pale fields.
Carolyn takes a pile
of dishes from the cupboard
& silverware from the
drawer & carries them

into the diningroom. Out of
the ref. she takes ready
to bake biscuit doughs &
unwraps them from their
cellophane, stuffs waste paper
in the corner bag that
sits in a wastebasket
out of sight — She
prepares the aluminum
silex for coffee — never
puts an extra scoop for
the pot — makes weak
American housewife coffee
— but who’s to
notice, the Prez. of the
Waldorf Astoria? — She
slams a frying pan on a
burner — singing “I hadnt
anyone till you & with
my lonely heart demanding
it, f-a-i-t-h must
have a hand in it — ”

mistaking “fate” — Out
comes the bacon & the
yellow plastic
basket of eggs — What’s
she going to make? Under
the faucet she cleans
garden fresh tomatos
from Mrs Harris’ —
She’s boiling potatos in a
pot — they’ve been there a
half hour — Thru her
little kitchen cupboard
window, framed like a
picture, see the old
redroofed flu cure barn
of the X farm — weary
gray wood in the eternities
of time — rickety poles
around it — the tobacco,
already picked from
the bottom a foot up,
pale & fieldsy before the
solemn backdrop of
that forest bush —
One intervening sad English
cone haystack — The
little children of the
Carolina suppertimes see
this & think: “And does
the forest need to eat?
In the night that’s
coming does the forest
know? Why is that dish
cloth hanging there so
still — & like the
forest — has no name
I know of — gloop — ”
Carolyn Blake is making
bacon & eggs & boiled
potatos for supper because
lately the family’s been
eating up breakfast
foods — just cereal & toast —

“Hm what pretty bacon,”
she says out loud. On
the radio now’s the
Lone Ranger. Lingering
statics clip & clop
amongst its William
Tell Overtures — a
rooster foolish crows —
Hand on hip, feet
crossed, casually, a cig
burning out in the ashtray,
she picks the bacon over
with a long cook fork.
“Hum hum hum” she hums.

Paul, having fixed the Jack
lawn mower, is in the yard
finishing the part of the lawn
last overlooked. The
deep rich fat grass lies in
serried heaps along the
trail of his machine
with the ditch, the road,
& the white road sign
“Easonburg” & yellow
“Stop” sign beyond — &
signs on a post pointing in
all the directions — ←
Route 95 2 → US 64
↓ Rocky Mt 3 ↑Sandy
Cross 4 — Paul, hat off,
sleeves rolled, glumly &
absentmindedly pushes at
his work; the motor makes
a drowsy suppertime growl
like the sound of a motor-
boat on some mystic lake
— At the crossroads store
groups of farmers have
gathered & smoke & sit
now. Heavenly mystical
lights have meanwhile
appeared in the sky as
the great machinery
continues in the High.

Intense interest is being
shown in the lawncutter —
Jack himself has just driven
over (on his way to town)
& is parked on lawn’s edge
discussing it with a young
farmer in overalls & white &
green baseball cap who app.
w. to buy it — Little
Paul runs to hear them
talk — At the store
five people are watching
intently. Men are be-
mused by machines. Americans,
by new, efficient
machines; Jack had the
money to buy a deluxe
cutter — 2 Negros
& 2 white farmers stare
intently at Paul in his
lawn, from the store, as
he backs up the car
to get to the grass
underneath it — Not once
has he lookt up & acknowledged
his watchers — works on.
Jack has driven off proudly
— Still another man
joins the watchers — &
now even George steps
out to see — now that
Jack’s driven off to whom
he hasnt spoken in years —
his twin brother. In Southern
accents — “Thats whut
ah think!” — they
discuss that splendid
grasscutter — Cars come
& park, & go — Cars
hurry on the hiway to
home,
“Wait till after
supper,” says Carolyn to
LP, “we’re ready to
eat now — ” as
he complains
“Ah — nao!”

but the complaint’s not
serious & doesnt last
long — And the air
is fragrant from cut
grass. “Come eat!”
And suddenly not a
soul’s at the store as
for other & similar &
just as blank reasons,
they’ve gone to
the silence
the suppers of their own
mystery.
Why should a chair be far
from a book case!
P: “Well that confound
yard is mowed.”
C: “Fi-na-lee.”
P: “Eat some supper
boy.”
C: — “What is it 27
now? 28? It musta
gone up, I thought
it was 26.”
P: (eating) (to LP) Eat
yr. beans, boy.
Better eat up chabeans, —
boy.

But all was not
always so peaceful with
the Blakes

When LP was born & lay
like a little turd in a
rich white basket in the
hospital (& the Grandma
& Uncle of his future peered
at him thru the slot in
the maternity door — &
the young nurse with glupcloth
on her mouth making
smiling eyes — & the
little mother half dead
in her bed. A premature
birth, he weighed 2 lbs.,
like so many links of
sausage or one modest
bologna; the ordeal cost
Paul $1,000 — which he
didnt have — Only a
miracle saved Mother &
Son anyway. The young
doctor said sententiously
“Long before Christ
there was a Greek who
found out why mothers
die from shock — ”
he emphasized “long before
Christ” in this natty
million dollar Duke Medical
Center where the only hint
of Christ lay if any in
the English-style ministers’
dormitory (students
for the ministry played
pingpong with their fiancees
in a fresh painted basement,
the emptiness of
modern Southern & American
life) — “long before Christ”
said the young doctor — as
Carolyn lay in a coma
in the quiet shade drawn
room — & the presence
of his Meek & Sorrowful
Humility hung like
molasses with air —

That was when Paul was
being sent from one town
to the other by the Tel Co
& never had enough money
for all he wanted, they
had a house on the
other side of RM, making
payments at a debilitating
rate of interest that
would eventually force
the house from them —
Paul a veteran of Palau
& Okinawa, an infantry
man of the island jungles,
now being usured & screwed
by nonJew Southern realtors
with bibles on their mantle
shelves & respectable
white shirts — sure, sure, —
the dark rain splattered
on the lonely house as
he waited nights for C
& the baby to come home —
“She can never have another
child — ” & across the
road from the
house, in the thicket
woods, rain, rain of the South
washed the sorrow & the
deep & something mourned
— & something whispered
to Paul: “You were
born in the woods — your
father was a farmer —
son of these rains — this
wilderness — wretched
victim of usurers &
bitter pain — yr. wife
has had yr. heir — you
sit alone in night —
dont let yr face hang,
dont let yr arms fall —
Doom is yr name —
Paul Death is yr name —
Paul Nothingness in the
big wild, wide & empty
world that hates you
is your name — Sit
here glooming all you
want — in debt, dark,
sad — Alone — You’ll
lose this house, you’ll lose
the 5, 6 dollars in yr
pocket — you’ll lose the
car in the yard — you’ll
lose the yard — you’ve
gained a wife & child —
almost lost them? They’ll
be lost eventually — a
grave that sinks from
the foot, that telegraphs
in dirt the sinking of a
manly chest — awaits
thee — and they — &
thou art an animal
dying in the wilderness —
Groo, groo, poor man
— groo — only the
heavens & the arcs
will ac-cept thee —
& Knowledge of heaven
& the arcs is not for
thee — so die, die,
die — & be silent —
Paul Blake in the
night, Paul Blake
in the No Carolina
rainy night . . .”
It took years to make
up the death; C. came
back feeble, pale, nervous;
took nervous pains with
the frail & tiny child;

the months rolled — one
of the bird dogs died of
the St Vitus dance —
in the mud — Only
old Bob survived, sitting
in wait for his master
at gray dusks — The
Autumn came, the winter
laid a carpet of one
inch snow, the Spring
made pines smell sweet
& powerful, the summer
sent his big haze-heat
to burn a hole thru
clouds & swill
up steams from fecund
earth — lost earth —
The Co. transferred
Paul from town to
town — Kinston — Tar
boro — Henderson
— (home of his folks) —
back to Kinston —
Rocky Mt. — Little
Paul grew — & cried
— & learned to suffer —
& cried — & learned
to laugh — & cried —
& learned to be still —
& suffered — Groo, groo,
the heavens dont care —
It had not always
been so easy & calm
as now at suppertime,
in BE, 1952 —
Hateful bitch of a
world, it wouldnt
ever last.

Yes, Yes, there they are
the poor sad people
of the South on Saturday
afternoon at
the Crossroads store —
Not so sad as heaven
watching but all the
more lost — all the
more lost — That
poor fat Negro woman
with her festive straw
hat for a joke but has
to be assisted from the
store where she supervised
the week’s grocery
purchases — on her
crutches; and old
Albino Freckles her
gaunt ghostly farmer
husband, comes tottering
after on his cane
— & they are deposited
in the car, nephew Jim
slowly wheels the old
family Buick (1937)
from the store — groceries
safe in the old boot trunk,
another week’s food
sustenance for the clan
in its solitudes of
corn —
Sat Afternoon in
the South — the
Jesus singers are already
hot for come-
Sunday tomorrow on
that radio — “Jee-
zas — ” 4, Five cars
are parked on one
side alone of that
store — & a truck —

and a bicyle — The
purchases are going
strong — inside rumbling
business, George cigar-in-
mouth is storing up his
Midas profits — only
the other day he fired
Clarence for being
late after seeing his
father at the hospital,
after five times driving
his useless bucktooth
wife to & fro the hospital
— out there’s sadness
enough without having
to run into that —
Here comes a flat
wagon, mule drawn,
with fat Pop, son &
granddotter, black,
all sitting legs adangle,
they didnt want to
shop his prices at George,
coming from another
down-the-road store —
eating the bought tidbits
of Saturday, — poverty,
sadness, name yr beef but
Pop is eating & is big &
fat — sits, maybe, on
the warpy porch in the
woods, lets son do
all the work — muching
— The little girl black &
ugly like Africa eats
her cone — Old Mule
clops on — Son-Bo
has eye on crossroads
for traffic — , holds reins
loose, they turn, talking,
into Rt 64 — now son

doesnt even look ahead —
quiet road — Old Mule
is alive just as they, suffers
under same skies, Saturday,
Weekday, Sunday shopping
day, Weekday fieldpull
day, Sunday churchgoing
day — sharing life with
the Jackson family —
they will remember that
old Mule & how it lived
with them & slowly religiously
drew them to
their needs, without
thanks, they
will remember the life
& presence of Old Mule
— & their hearts’ll cry
— “Old Mule was with
us — We fed him oats —
he was glad & sad
too — then he died —
buried in the mule earth
— forgot — like a
man a mule is & will
be — ” Ah North
Carolina (as they turn
into the countrified home
& slowly roll home with
the groceries of the
week scattered on the
platform) — Ah
Saturday — Ah
skies above the gnawing
human scene.

LP Mama slice me one
of am — slice me
this kind of am —
what is this —
Mama what
kind is this?
C Swiss!
LP I want Swiss
Nam nam nam
(hamburg frying) (radio
noon) (hot South)

Saturday afternoon in Rocky
Mt. woods — in a tankling
gray coupe the young father
crosses the crossroads with
his 4 dotters piled on the
seat beside him all eyes
— The drowsy store the
great watermelons sit disposed
in the sun, on the
concrete, by the fish box,
like so many fruit in
an artist’s bowl —
watermelons plain green
& the watermelon with
the snaky rills all
tropical & fat to burst
on the ground — came
from viney bottoms of
all this green fertility —
Behind Fats’ little shack,
under waving tendrils
of a pretty tree, the
smalltime Crapshooters
with strawhats & overalls
are shooting for 10¢
stakes — as peaceful &
regardant as deer in
the morning, or New
England boys sitting in
the high grass waiting for
the afternoon to pass.
Paul Blake ambles over
across the road to watch
the game, stands
back, arm on tree,
watching smiling silence.
Cars pull up, men
squat — there goes Jack
to join them, everywhere
you look in the enormity
of this peaceful scene
you see him walking, on
soft white shoes, bemused
— Last night a few
hotshots & local sailors
on leave grabbed those

reed fishingpoles &
waved them in the drunken
Friday night dark, yelling
“Sturgeon! — catfish!
— Whooee!” —
They’re still unbought
in the old stained
barrell — A trim little
truck is parked, eagerly
at the ice porch, the
farmer’s inside having
5 pounds of pork chops
sliced, he likes em for
breakfast — A
hesitant Negro laborer
headed home to his
mother & younger brothers
in the woods is speculating
over a hambone in the
counter — Sweet
life continues in the
breeze, the golden fields —
August senses September
in the deeper light of
its afternoons — senses
Autumn in the brown
burn of the corn, the
stripped tobacco — the
faint singe appearing
on the incomprehensible
horizons — the tanned
tiredness of gardens, the
cooler, brisker breeze —
above all the cool
mysterious nights —

Night — & when the
great rains of the
night boom & thunder
in the South, when
the woods are blackened,
made wet,
mudded, shrouded,
impossibled —

& when the rain
drips from the roof
of the G. Store
in silver tragic milky
beadlets over the bright
bulb-light of the
old platform — inside
we see the snow white
bags of flower, the
whitewashed woodwalls,
the dark & baneful
harness hanging, a
few shining buckets
for the farm —
Sat. rainy night,
the cars come by
raising whizzes of
smoky dew from
the road, their tires
hum, they go off
to a rumble of
their own —
And the great falls —
The watermelons are
wetted, cooled — The
earth breathes a
new rank cold up
— there’s winter
in the bones of this
earth — Thunder of
our ancestors, Blake,
Kingsley, Harris, —
thunder of our ancestors
rumbles in the unseen
sky — the wood walls
of the store have now
that tragic businesslike
look of hardships in
the old rain, use in
old wars, old necessities
— Now we see that
there were men who
wore raincoats & boots
& struggled here —

& only left their ghosts,
& these few hardhip
houses, to sit in the
Saturday night rain.
How different from
the Saturday night of
the cities, the Chinatowns,
the harbors of the
world! — This silent
place haunted by
corn shapes, the
beauteous shrouds of
fields, the white leer
flash of lightning, the
stern tones of thunder
(the rattlebones of
bunder, the long buuk
braun roll of munder,
the far off hey - Call
of old poor sunder,)
— Ah South! of
which I read, as a
child, of coonskin caps,
Civil wars, piney woods,
brothers, dogs, morning
& new hope — Ah
South! Poor America!
The rain has been
falling a long time on
thee & on thy
history —
George hustles across
the road with a
bagful of his own
beer — a Grandet
of the Americas,
worse than Grandet!
he wears no miser’s
Puritan cap, or
gloves, but smoking
a harmless cigar —

the bulb shines sad
& lonely on the old
wood porch of the
South — I see it —
In the loam of
the Blake yard sweet
rain has soaked
in greens & flowers
& the grass, & in
the mud, & sends
up fragrances of
the new clean
eternal Earth —
Inside the low
roofed homey rosy
lit Blake home, see
the little family
there, bearing Time
in a rainy hour
in the silence of themselves
Leaves thin-shadow on
the wall — on the
mottled redbrick base
foundation — on the
wet variant tangled
weeds & up-sway
grasses of the yard —
Rain glitters in
little bark-pools
of the tree-trunk
— sweet cool night
& washed up, heavy
hanging vegetation
— Lights of passing
cars dance in the
drip-drops of the
awning — Little Paul
muses at the sofa
window, turns &
yells — “Why is
it cause, Daddy, why
is it cause?”

PANORAMIC CATALOG SKETCH OF BIG EASONBURG

(backyard)

From right 90° to left
rich brick house where kid
lives who rides pony thru tobacco
field, farmers say
“Come on, work in the barn”
& his father driving by says
“If you wanta work, that
barn is ready” & he gallops
away saying, “The hell
with work” & niggerfarmers
& pickaninnies in hotfield
chuckle & scratch heads —
Patrician little bitch he is —
his house has big TV antenna,
8 white gables, big
garage, swings, trucks,
Farmall tractor, white iron
lawnchairs, Bird houses
dog pens, clip’t shrubs, lawn,
basketball basket & pole,
— behind house we see
trees & pines of the forest
— a thin scraggle of corn
a 100 feet off — The
dreaming weedy meadow
— then the redroof outbuildings
of Andrews old
farm — with brick chimnies,
graywood built, ancient,
lost in trees which in clear
late afternoon make glady
black holes for the Sweeny
in the Trees dream of
children — distant rafts
of corn — then the tobacco
curing barn near a
stick ramp with piled
twigs or boughs & a redroof
porch, & a door, smoked,
at top,
tho still with old hay

hook for when it once
was a barn (?) — there
too black holes of green
woods — A brand new
flu-cure barn with white tin
roof, new wood, unpainted,
no windows — Then another
old one — over the yellowing
topleaves of the tobacco
field — then the majestic
nest of Great Trees where
homestead sits — darkshaded,
hidden, mystical & ripplylit,
hints of red roofs,
old gray dark wood,
poles, old chimney, still,
peaceful, mute, with
shadows lengthening along
barnwalls — The trees:
fluffy roundshaped except
for stick tree in middle
forking ugly up, & on
right skeletal of underround
silhouetting dark
boughs against wall of
forest till round of umbrella
leaftop — Between here
& there I see the rigid
woodpole sticks out of
haystack, conical Stack,
with a cross stick, surrounded
by hedge of weeds, of
brown & gray gold hairy
texture in clear French
Impressionistic Sun —
After farm solid
wall of forest broken
sharply at road, where
wall resumes on other side
— There is the gray

vision of the old tenant
shack with pale brick
chimbley silhouetted
against a hill-height of
September corn turned
frowsy & hay color —
with mysterious Carolina
continuing distant trees
beyond — & the faintest
wedge of littlecloud right
on horizon above — Across
road forestwall is darker,
deeper, pine trunks stand
luminous in the dark shade
bespotted & specked with
background browngreen
masses — horizontal puff-
green pinebranches, all
over the frizzly corn
top sea — Then Rod’s
logcabin, with pig pen
(old gray clapboards) &
whitewashed barrel & Raleigh
News & Observer mailbox
& telephone pole connecting
up house with 3 strands —
his withered corn in yard,
chimney, logs mixed with
white plaster, rococo
log cabin, horizontal
wood & plaster striped
chimney — Fruit tree in
back waving in faintbrown
of its California — Similar
house of neighbor where stiff
gentleman sits in Panama
hat in Carolina rockchair
surveying rusticities —

Then, in deepening shadows:
- (with him some
women with lap chillun,
Sun-afternoon, breeze, beez
of bugs, hum of cars on
hiway) — Far off in
pure blue an airliner
lines for Richmond —
— then the yellow diamond
Stop sign, back of it,
with brown wood pole
shadowing across it — A
stand of sweetly stirring
trees & then Buddy Tom’s
corn, tall, rippling, talkative,
haunted, gesturing, dogs run
thru it, weeds run riot,
trees protrude beyond —
Then his whitewashed
poles, chickencoop, doors,
hinges, rickety wire —
weeds — wild redflowers —
a tall stately pine
with black balls of
cone silhouetted against
keen blue — under
it an excited weeping
willow waving like
a Zephyr song — 2 cars
parked beneath it, blue
fishtail Cad — Tom’s —
stiff big red flower —
folks visitin, talking —
children — Lillian in
shorts (big, fat) dumps
a carton in the rusty
barrel — The base of
pine whitewashed — Buddy
Tom’s shed, just & peek
at interior shelf &
paint can — leaning
rake — Forest wall beyond.

They sit with the gold
on their hair —

SECOND BOOK

AUG. 5, ’52

The diningroom of
Carolyn Blake has
a beautiful hardwood
floor, varnished shiny,
with occasional dark
knots; the rag rug
in the middle is woven
by her mother of the
historic socks, dresses
& trousers of the
Kerouac family in 2
decades, a weft of
poor humanity in its
pain & bitterness — The
walls are pale pink
plaster, not even pink,

a pink-tinged pastel,
the No Carolina afternoon
aureates through the
white Venetian blinds
& through the red-pink
plastic curtains & falls
upon the plaster, with
soft delicate shades — here,
by the commode in
the corner, profound
underwater pink; then,
in the corner where
the light falls flush,
bright creampink
that shows a tiny
waving thread of
spiderweb overlooked

by the greedy housekeeper
— So the white
paint shining on the
doorframes blends with
the pink & pastel &
makes a restful room.
The table is of simple
plytex red surface,
with matching little
chairs covered in
red plastic — But Oh
the humanity in the
souls of these chairs,
this room — no words!
no plastics to name
it!
Carolyn has set out
a little metal napkin
holder, with green
paper napkins, in
the middle of her
table. Nothing is
provincial — there is
nothing provincial in
America — unless
it is the radio, staticing
from late afternoon
Carolina August
disturbances — the
vast cloud-glorious
Coastal Plain in its
green peace —

The voices of rustic-
affectated announcers
advertising feeds
& seeds — & dull
organ solos in the
radio void — Maybe
the rusticity of the
province of NC is
in the pictures on C’s
livingroom wall: 2
framed pictures of
bird dogs, to please
her husband Paul,
who hunts. A noble
black dog stepping
with the power of a

great horse from a
pond, quail-in-mouth,
with sere Autumns
in the brown swales
& pale green forests
beyond; & 2 noble
nervous white & brown
dogs in a corn-gold
field, under pale
clouds, legs taut, tails
stiff like pickets,
with a frondy sad
glade beyond where
an old Watteau would
have placed his
misty courtiers book

in hand at Milady’s
fat thigh — These
pictures are above the
little dining table —
Meaningless picturelets
over the bureau in
the other corner (put
there temporarily
by finicky Carolyn)
a dull picture of
red flowers & fruit
rioting in the gloom —
One chair: - a
black high-back
wood rocker, with
low seat, styled

in the oldfashioned
country way, hint
of old New England
& Colonial Carolina —
a hint lost to the
static of the radio
& the hum & swish
of the summer fan
set on the floor to
circulate air in a
wide arc from one
extreme twist of
its face to the
other — a fan
brought home by her
husband from his
office at the Telephone
Company.
CB herself, cig in
mouth, is opening the
windows behind the
blinds — she’d closed
them at 9 o’clock
AM to keep the
morning freshness in
— & now, near 4,
the air cooling,
she opens them again
— a fan can
only stir dusts of
the floor — Instantly
scents of fields

& trees comes into the
pink room with the
hardwood floor — A
gay wicker basket
is on the floor beneath
the windows,
full of newspapers
& magazines & a
Sears Roebuck catalogue
— CB is
wearing shorts, sandals
& a nondescript vestshirt
— just did her
housework — washed
the lunch dinners
& is about to take a

bath — The breeze
of afternoon pillows
in the redpink plastic
curtains. Carolyn
Blake stands, cig in
mouth, glancing briefly
at the yard outside
— beyond it stretches
a meadow, a corn
field, a tobacco
field, & faintly
beyond the wreckage
of a gray flucuring
barn the
wall of the forest
of the South.

CB is a thin, trim
little woman of 33 —
looking younger, with
cut bangs, short hair,
bemused, modern —
On her commode, two
shelves above a drawer
& opening hinged door,
pale wood, is a
wooden salad bowl,
upright; two China
plates, upright; an
earthen jug of
Vin Rosé, empty,
brought from NY
by her mother;

a green glass dish —
for candy — a glass
ashtray — & two
brass candle holders
— these things luminescent
in the glow
from the windows,
in still, fan-buzzing,
lazy Carolina afternoon
time. On the
radio a loud prolonged
static from
nearby disturbances
rasps a half
minute —
On the wall
above the husband’s
diningtable chair
hangs a knickknack
shelf, with 3 levels,
tiny Chinese vase
bowl with cover —
copper horse equestrian
& still in its
petite mysterious
shelf — & Chinese
porcelain rice-girl
with hugehat &
double baskets.
These are some of
the incidental
appurtenances in
the life of a little

Carolina housewife
in 1952.

She turns & goes into
the parlor — a
more elegant room,
with green leather
chairs, gray rug, book
shelves, — goes to the
screen door — lets
in Little Paul &
Little Jackie Lee —
Her son Little Paul comes
yells “Mommy I
wants some ice water!
Me & Jackie Lee wants
some ice water!
Mommy!” She shoos
them in with an absentminded
air —
Little Paul, blond, thin,
is her son; Jackie Lee,
dark, plumper, belongs
to a neighbor — They
rush in, barefooted,
each 4, in little
shorts, screaming,
wiggling —
In the kitchen, at
her refrigerator she
pours out ice

cube trays — Little
Paul holds the green
plastic waterbottle —
“That water’s warm,”
says Carolyn Blake,
“let me make you
some ice — ”
“I wants some
cracked ice Mommy!
Is that what you
wants Jackie Lee?”
“Ah-huh,” — assent,
“Ah-huh Pah-owl.”
The little mother
gravely works on the
ice; above the sink,
with a crank, is an
ice cracker; she

jams in the ice cubes,
standing tip toe
reaches up & cranks
it down into a red
plastic container;
wiggling the little boys
wait & watch — The
kitchen is modern &
clean — She slowly
goes about taking down
small glasses from
a cupbord, jams the
crushed ice in them.
They clasp the
glasses & rush off —
to Little Paul’s
bedroom.

“This is our home, that
trailer’s our home,”
says Little Paul as
they wrangle over
a toy trailer-truck
on the white chenille
bedspread.
They have toy horses,
“Now you kill yrs.”
“Kill yours” — Jackie
“He’s killed.”
“Arent you glad?”
“They aint nothing
but big bad wolves . . .

Hey — mine’s got a
broken leg.”
“Give it to me.”
“They’re not your
horses!”
An incredible
city of toys in the
corner, on a card
table, a big doll
house, garages, cranes,
clutters of card,
accordions, silos,
dogs, tables, cash
registers, merry
go rounds with

insignia goldhorses,
marbles, airplanes,
an airport —
Little Paul —
“Here — here’s $12
for those horses,”
striking cashregister,
Jackie: “12 dollars?”
The bedroom has
pastel green walls;
the crib in the corner’s
now only for toys —
Polo Pony for water,
a balloon; rubber
naked doll; black
lamb — At foot
of bed a hamper
full of further toys —
On a little table
with flowery tablecloth
a small standing
library of Childrens
books — A huge
double bed, four posts,
the little Prince
gets up on it &
walks around —
He opens the
hamper, “Jackie!
know what? I
found a rake!”

Holding toy rake.
“You can work on
the track.”
On the open hamper
cover they hammer
their horses. “This
is gonna be a
horse race.” Paul
finds a track from
his Lionel Train box.
“Are they glad?”
“Yes.”
“Here comes another
straight track!”
— to distinguish from
curve tracks —
“Dont let em go
Jackie!” he calls
from the track
box.
“I wont.”
“Ding ding ding!”
shouts Paul pounding
with a railroad stop
sign on the hamper.
“Ding ding racehorse!
Ding ding track!”
Jackie: “One of em’s our
main horse!”
“Huh?”
“This one’s our
main horse.”
“Pah-owl the
horses are goin out
in the tunnel! — ”
“The train’s not
comin down that
way. I better
make a turn race.
No — ” adjusting
curvetrack to straight
track — “no, gotta
git anodder race
track — You
better help me
Jackie.”

“Why?”
“Cause — Cause
this is a hard track.
Sure. Sure is.
Now let me put a
track right here.
Hard. This hard.”
“Now it’s goin
right around that
tunnel. Paul we’re
gonna have a whole
lot. We have
crow-co-dals — ”
“If you mess up
that train track
one more — I’ll

shoot ya!”
Jackie: “Talkin to me?”
Paul: “Shoo — flooshy you.”
Outside, in gold
day, the weeping
willows of Buddy Tom
Harris hang heavy
& languid & beauteous
in the hour of life;
the little boys are
not aware of
God, of Universal
Love, & the vast
earth bulging in
the sun — they
are a part of
the swarming mystery
and of the salvation
— their eyes reflect
humanity & intelligence
—
In the kitchen the
little mother, letting
them play, bustles
& bangs around for
supper. Something
in the air presages
the arrival of the
father old man —
Soft breeze puffs
the drapes in Paul’s
room as he & Jackie
wriggle on the floor
“Hey Jackie — you
got it on the wrong way
aint ya? Now
put this in the back
— now fix it.
(Singing) I think
I’ll get on this train,
I think I’ll get
on that train,
I think I’ll get
on the ca-buss.
Broom! briam!”
lofting his wood
plane — screaming —
“Eee- yall —
gweyr! ” On
his belly, smiling, —
suddenly thinking
silently . . .

In the kitchen
changed to yellow
tailored shorts,
tailored gray vest
shirt, & white sandals
the little housewife
prepares supper. She
stands at the white
tile sink washing the
small squash under
the faucet — preliminary
maneuvers for
a steak supper she
decided upon at the
last minute —
“Hello Geneva —
he went to Henderson this
noon — I think he’ll
be back — bye — ”
— She slices them into
a glass bowl, standing
idly on one foot
with the other out-
thrust at rest —
the little boys now
playing outside —
The screendoor
slams out front —
“Hey!” cries
CaB not moving from
her work
“Hey Moe” greets
her husband —

He comes into the
kitchen, Panama
hat, white shirt, tie
— casual — tall,
husky, blond, hand-
some — smooth moving,
slow moving, relaxed
Southerner — He
has mail & that afternoon
at his mother’s
house in Henderson
50 miles away, while
on a business trip for the
tel. co., he went
thru his grandmother’s
trunk & found old
letters & a pair of
old diamond studded

cuff links, he stands
in the middle of the
kitchen reading the
old letter — written
by a lost girl to
his uncle Ed also
now lost — the sadness
of long lost enthusiasms
on ruled paper, in
pencil —
But now a storm
is coming — “It’s
gonna storm,” says
Jack — From the
west the ranked
forward-leaning
clouds come parading
— stationary puff
clouds of the calm
are snuffed &
taken up — From
the East big black
thunderhead with
his misty gloom
forms hugeing —
Directly above

the embattled roof
of the Blake’s the
sea of dark has
formed — the first
light snaps — the
first thunder crackles,
rolls, & suddenly
drops to the bottom
with a shake-earth
boom — More &
more the rushing
clouds are gray, a
forlorn airplane in
the southeast hurries
home — Far in
the northeast

the remnant afternoon’s
still soft
& fleecy gold, still
rich, calm, clouds
still make noses &
have huge maws
of incomprehensible
comedy in their
sides — Thunder
travels in the West
heavens — “parent
power dark’ning in
the West” — A
straycloud hangs
upsidedown & helpless
in the thunderhead
glooms, still retaining
white —

Mrs. Langley nextdoor
swiftly removes her
sheets & wash from
the wire line — looks
around timidly —
absent in her work,
frowning in the glare,
peaceful in the
stillness before storm
(as one birdy tweets
in the forest across
to the North) — Grass,
flowers, weeds wave
with dull expectancy
— The first spray
drops wetten the
little Langley girl
in her garden

play — “Hey” she
says — Children
call from all sides
as the rain begins
to patter — Still
a bird sings.
Still in the NE
the clouds are
creampuff soft &
afternoon dreamy.
Some blues show
in the horizon grays
— Now the rain
pelts & hums —
gathers to a wind —
a hush — a mighty
wash — the

trees are showing
signs of activity — ,
the corn rattles,
the wall of the
forest is dimmed
by smokeshroud
rains — a solitary
bee rises, the
road glistens. It
is hot & muggy. Cars
that come from
up the road roll on
their own sad images
gray & dumb —
The cooling thirsting
earth sighs up a
cucumber freshness
mixed with steams
of tar & warp danks
of wood — Toads
scream in the meadow
ditch, the Harris rooster
crows. A new
atmosphere like the
atmosphere of screened
porches in Maine in
March, on cold
gray days; &
not like sunny Carolina
in July, is seen
thru the windows
above the kitchen
sink: dark wet
leaves are shaking
like iron. A tiny

ant pauses to rub
its threads on a
spine of leaf —
the fly solemnly
jumps from the
bedspread to the
screen hook — as
breezes rush into
the house from that
perturbed West.
“Close that door!”
cries the mother —
doors slam —
“Paul I said you
stay here!”
Rain nails kiss
the dance of the shiny
road.

The parched tobacco is
dark as grass.
Behind the storm the
blue reappears — it was
just a passing shower —
CB doesnt even bother
to close her windows.
Inside an hour the
grass is almost dry
again, vast areas of
open blue firmament
show the cottonball
horizons low & bright
over the darknesses
of the pine wall woods,
up the road in clean
white shirt & pale overalls
that looked
almost washed by the
rain, comes the pure
farmer, a Negro,
limping, as orgones dance
in the electric washed
new air.
All is well in
Rocky Mount, North
Carolina, as 5 o’clock
in the afternoon shudders
on a raindrop leaf,
& the men’ll be coming
home.

AVILA BEACH, CALIF. (WRITTEN YEAR LATER)

Seethe rush
longroar of sea
seething in floor
of sand — distant
boom of world
shaking breakers
— sigh & intake
of sea — income,
outgo — rumors
of sea —
hushing in air —
hot rocks
in the sand —
the earth shakes
& dances to the
boom — I think
I hear propellers
of the big union
oil Tanker
warping in at
pier — A great
lost rock sits
upended on
the skeely sand
— — Who the
fuck cares

1954 RICHMOND HILL SKETCH ON VAN WYCK BOULEVARD

Before my eyes I see
“Faultless Fuel Oil” written
in white letters on a green
board, with “11-30” in
small numbers on each
side to indicate the street
address of the company.
The building is small,
modern, redbrick, square,
with curious outjutting
new type triangular
screens that I cant really
examine from this side
of the boulevard but look
like protection from
oldfashioned robbers &
stones — The garage door
entrance for the oil
trucks: green. The

building sits upon the
earth under a gray
radiant sky — I see
vague boxes in the right
front window — Cars
are going by with a
sound like the sea in
the superhiway below it
— It is very bleak
& I only give you the
picture of this bleakness.
By bleakness I mean:
unnatural, stiff, lost
in a void it cant
understand, — in a
void to which it has no
relation because of the
transiency of its function,
to earn money by delivering
oil. But it has

a neat Tao of its
own. In any case this
scene is of no interest
to me. & is only an
example. A scene
should be selected by
the writer, for haunted-
ness-of-mind interest.
If you’re not haunted
by something, as by a
dream, a vision, or
a memory, which are
involuntary, you’re not
interested or even involved.

SKETCH WRITTEN IN OUELLETTE’S LUNCH IN LOWELL MASS. 1954

“Ya rien plus pire qu’un
enfant malade —
a lava les runs — j’aita assez découragez
j brauilla avec — ”
“Un ti peu d gravy*
d tu?” — “Staussi bien . . . Mourire
chez nous que mourire
la” — “L’matin
yava les yieux griautteux”
— “J fa jama deux
journée d’suite” —
“J mallez prende
une marche — ” “Comme
qui fa beau apramidi ha?”

“A tu lavez les vites?”
— “J ai lavez toute les
vites du passage” —
“Qui mange dla
marde”
“A lava les yeux
pochées — tsé quand
qu’on s leuve des foit?”

CAT SKETCH ON THE CONCORD RIVER (1954)

The Perfect Blue Sky
is the Reality, all 6
Essential Senses abide
there in perfect
indivisible Unity
Forever — but
here down on the
stain of earth the
ethereal flower in
our minds, dead
cats in the Concord,
it’s a temporary
middle state between
Perfection of
the Unborn & Perfection
of the
Dead — the Restored
to Enlightened
Emptiness — Compromise
me no more, “Life”
— the cat had no
self, was but the
victim of accumulated
Karma, made
by Karma, removed
by Karma (death)
— What we
call life is just
this lugubrious
false stain in the
crystal emptiness
— The cat in waters
“hears” Diamond
Samadhi, “sees”
Transcendental Sight —

“smells” Trans. odor,
“tastes” Trans. taste,
“feels” Trans. feeling,
“thinks” Trans. thot
the one Thot
— So I am not
sad for him —
Concord River RR
Bridge
Sunday Oct 24 ’54
Lowell
5 PM

A ridiculous N E
tumbleweed danced
across the RR Bridge

Thoreau’s Concord
is blue aquamarine
in October red
sereness — little
Indian hill towards
Walden, is orange
brown with Autumn —
The faultless sky
attests to T’s solemn
wisdom being correct
— but perfect Wisdom
is Buddha’s
Today I start teaching
by setting the example
not words only

ROCKY MOUNT 1952 (again) WHILE HITCH HIKING BACK FROM NORFOLK VA.

“You done lost the
man’s hole . . . Smart
Alex.”

N.C. — Near Woodland N.C.
Hams hanging by wild
bulb-bugs in hot
N.C. nite — sad dust
of driveway, scattered
softdrink hot-day
bottles, old crates
sunk in earth for
steps, pumps (Premium
& Pure Pep) —

hillbilly music in car
— trucks growling
thru — old tire,
rake — old concrete
block — old bench —
& tufts of green
grass seen au bord du
chemin quand les
machines passes —
L —

ROCKY MOUNT CAR SHOP (RAILROAD)

Yard in afternoon of
August — bright red
drum shining in bright green
& yellow grass-weeds, buds, —
old used rusty brakeshoes
& parts piled —

Sooty old woodwarp
ramp — in weeds —
fat RR clerk with
baseball hat walking
across, cigar, scratching
head, removing hat —
will go home to dogs,
radio, wife, blond boy
on a tricycle in white
bungalow — Old A.C.L.
Railway Exp Ag. 441
weather-brown
Cracked cars — 2, 3
of them — nameless
parts arranged in
weeds by tired Negro
workers — Puff sweet
Carolina clouds in sultry
blue over head — my
eyes smarting from fresh
paint in office, from
no sleep — drowsy
office like school days,
with sleepy rustles of
desk papers & lunch-in-
the-belly — hate it —
SP is in cool, dry
Western, romantic Frisco
of bays — with —
hills of purple eve &
mystery — & Neal
— — here is fuzzy,
unclear, hot, South,
hot turpentined poles
at tracks that lead

to Morehead City, Sea &
Africa — & impossible
lead tho — just dull
fat cops & people in
heat — Easonburg is
better.

DIDNT HAVE PENCIL with
me to sketch the
bluebells that climb
up from beautiful
fields of weeds to
curl around the old
dead cornstalk that
is rattly crackly
deadbone & wreaths
it purple, softens it,
gives it a juicier
(THE WOODS ARE SHINING)
sound in the wind,
droops it, embraces
it, gives it the
Autumn kiss for
harvest stack farewell
— old Melancholy Frowse
is wound round in
Carolina in the
Morning —
The piercing blue of
the first Autumn
day, the woods
are shining, the
Nor’east wind making
ripples in the
flooded tarns — all
is lovely this Sunday morn.
The Weeping Willow
no longer hangs but
waves ten thousand
goodbyes in the
direction of the wind
— The clean
little tele. pole without
crossbars stands lost
in Carolina vegetations,
some of the corn half
its height, & that
lush forest of
Carolina backs it
solemnly & with
a promise — that
was here for boys killed
in Palau in 1944, boys —

that had sisters who
yet mourn this Sun.
morning — hope
that was there for
the strange Cherokee
— & now for me
that wanders round
my earth — amen.

Sitting in the middle
of the woods with
Little Paul, Princey
& Bob — Little foxy
Prince sits panting
— big mosquitos —
Big Bob panting
hard, tongue out,
licks his mouth,
blinks eye, big
tongue flapping over
sharp teeth —
drooling — Pine
needle floor is
brown, dry cracky
odorless —
blue sky
is sieve above
tangled dry
vining green heart
leafing trunking
cobwebbing —
now & then sway
massedly in upper
winds — Sun
makes joy gold
spots all over

The sand road
is blinding old —
many gnats —
cars raise storms
of dust — wind
sways grass

in ditch ridges —
straight thinpines
stand in vaulty
raw blue, clean —
Negroboys bike
by smiling —
Princey’s little
wet nose —
no more — no more —
Oh Princey, Bob,
Little Paul, woods
of Easonburg, no more
— (freedom of
the blue cities calls
me.)

SHORT TIC SKETCHES (TICS ARE FLASHES OF MEMORY OR DAYDREAM)

(1) Hartford — when I was
a boy poet & wrote
for myself — no
frantic fear of “not
being published,” but
the joy, the shining
morning, “This love
of mine” — leaves,
houses, Autumn — and
Immortality
(2) Hospital, 1951, letting
the images overwhelm
me, not rushing out
to lasso them &
getting all pooped
out — NOW Coach
(3) Oh when I was young &
had a pretty little Edie
in bright lavender
sweater to hug to
me — big breasts, thighs
warm, bending-to-me waist,
— now I’m cold as
the moon . . . no more women
for puffy-eyed Jack —
who once posed in a
button-down boy sweater
for a picture — When —
O when, reading the N.Y.
Times, he thought he
was learning everything —
& has learned but decay
only — & sadness of partings —

(4) Mr Whatsisname
in beat ragged coat
in r.r. office, has same
haggard anxious soulneglected
sorrow as
he searches among
ledgers, mouth open,
as my father in his
shop of old yore —
with glasses on
nose, blue eyes, —
O doom, death,
come get me! I cannot
live but to remember
— old puff lined
Jack, go put a
poor blanket of
dirt over your
noble nose.
Last night, under the
stars, I saw I belonged
among the big poets
(did I read that somewhere?)

(5) Raw, almost childlike
slowmotion dinosaur
ideas of 1947
bop on So. Main
L.A. — “You Came
To Me From out of
Nowhere” — The
ideas of serious basic
thinkers, young, energetic,
powerful — joy comes
from the really new —
Bird was like that, but
more & most complex

Be like Bird, find y.self
little story tunes to
string yr. complexities
along a wellknown line
or you will sound like
a crazy Tristano of
the Seymour-record
(Bartok — Bar Talk)
( Bela BarTalk)
— Bird has visions between
bridges — So do you
in visions between chapter
lines — — !!!
Shakespeare, Giroux’s
Shakespeare Opera
Books — simple — not
that simple but use
story-forms — or phooey,
do what you please —

Never will be bored in the
bottom — at the hut, the
secret room, the weed,
the mind — the daVinci
series —

I was in my mother’s
house, in winter — I was
writing “The Sea is My
Brother” — what have
I learned since then?
I have written Doctor
Sax since last prattling
like this —

NEAR SANDY CROSS N.C.

Quiet shady
sand road at
late afternoon, a
crick pool-like
& ripple reflecting
& brown with
froth spit motionless,
& exotic
underwater leaves,
& tangled jungly
banks under dry
old board bridge
— vined sides of it
— a wild claw
tree protruding from
silent greeneries —
with 12 agonies

of fingers, & one
twisted guilty body,
the weatherbeaten bark
as clean as a
woman’s good thigh,
with a climb of
vines on it — The
brown & tragic
cornfield shining in
the late sun up the
road — The clearing,
the negros, the
flu barn, the white
horse nibbling —
Coca Cola sign at
the lonely golden
little bend — a cricket

I got up this road
into my Maturity

And what will that
corn do for you?
— will it soothe you
& put you to bed
at night? Will
it call yr name
when winter blows?
Or will it just
mock the bones
of yr. skeleton,
when August
browning breaks
its Silence camp,
& blows —
Immortality just
passed over me
— in these woods
— as it cooled —
& darked — at
6 PM —
The Angel visited me &
told me to go on

THESE Mornings in A.C.L.
office will be remembered
as happy — the visionary
tics, the dreams, the delicate
sensations — must be
that way on the road
of rock & rail.

Repeat — let it come
to you, dont run after it
— It would be and is like
running after sea waves —
to embrace them up where
you stand when you catch
them — aïe —
TICS
The long dismal winter
street where I’d go to see
Grace Buchanan — & Mary —
(The prophet is without
honor in his own family.)
A “tic” is a sudden thought
that inflames & immediately
disappears —
The Indians see a Little
Cloud a Shining Traveller
in the Blue Sky

TIC
The yard with the
brothers & dogs in the
rickety back of Ozone
Park back of Aqueduct track
— Why’ is it have to be Kentucky?

The Time-type executive
— “Ahuh, — yeah —
That would be about
500 kegs a month —
Well alright if
that takes care of
yr situation thats
what they want I
expect — Yeah —
hm — We’ll try to do
that this afternoon
— anything you want
just holler — ah huh —
— bye — same to
you” — click —

TICS
O fogs of South City,
the rumble of the drag,
outside, chicory coffee,
the doom-wind-sheds
of Armour & Swift —
waybills in the Night —
the clean mystery
of California — these
sensations — Why makes
it me shudder to remember,
if it aint hanted —

The exams in University
Gym — Bill Birt, morning —
those smells, sensations,

rise to me from just
standing at requisition
shelf where fresh paint
& cool breeze blow — usually
rouses Frisco RR work —
Why? — if not hanted,
charged materially with
substances that are
locked in (and as
Proust says waiting to be
unlocked.) Ah I’m
happy — Yet it’s only
11:30 & Time Crawls —
& I’m so sick of the
burden time, everything’s
already happened, why
not happen all at
once, the charge in
one shot —
Old clerk to other old
clerk — 25 yrs. same
place — “What are you
today, Columbus?” —
as he searches lost ledger
— Sad? It’s abominable

— The names of old
lost Bigleaguers Cudworth
used to paste in his books —
1934, 1933 — Dusty Cooke,
lost names — lost suns —
as more sad than rain —
— those 2 men drinking
at the old bar on Third
& alley — old Meeks
Bar 1882 — why do I think
of them? — Pa & Charley
Morrissette spectralizing
Frisco-Lowell —

ROCKY MOUNT oldstreet
with 90 year old Buffalo
Bill housepainter spitting
brown ’bacca juice on
roof, — & younger painter
who heartbreakingly white-
washes that part near the
porch reminds me of poor
lost Lowell — And old
lady sewing little boy
bluepants on historic
porch breaks my heart —
& old black bucket &
fire in negroyard & little
gal in scrabble reminds
me Mexico & the Fella-
heen peoples I love —
for old retired couple on
that porch aint just
sittin in the sun, sit
in judgment & Western
hatred — not all
of em —

I am alone
in Eternity with my Work
For
as I sat on the
burnt out stump on
the Concord River bank
staring into the flawless
blue & thinking of
earth as a stain,
suddenly I realized
the utter absurdity of
my squatting assy
humanity too, the
infinitely empty
crock of form, like
suddenly hearing myself
sneeze in the quiet
Street night & it
sounds like somebody
else — Therefore, is
my pelvic ambition
for girl’s bone-cover
the True Me? — or
is it not, like the
sneeze & the ass,
absurd, like the
smell of the shit
of a saint

THE GREAT FALL is
rumbling in America —
in back of the Telephone
office in R.M. you
can see it in the profounder
blue of the late aft sky
as seen from among
the downtown Southern
redbricks — in the
brown tips of leaves
on trees over the garage
wall — The wholesale
hardware wall — in the
particular cold deep red
that has suddenly
come into the tobacco
warehouse roof with
its spotted loft-
windows — inside,
faintly in the

brown like Autumn tobacco
brown, the piles
of bacco baskets —
Here watching Paul’s car I
sit — poised for the
continent again, Aug. 27 ’52
And in San Jose the
Great Fall is tangled
brown among the
greens of sun valley
trees, deep shadows
of morning make the
woodfence black
against the golden
flares of sere grass —
California is always
morning, sun, & shade
— & clean —

lovely motionless green
leaves — vague
plaster rocks lost in
fields — the dazzling
white sides of houses
seen thru the tangly
glade branches —
the dry solemn ground
of California fit for
Indians to sleep on
— the cardboard
beds of hoboes along
the S.P. track up at
Milpitas — & the
clean blue deep
night at Permanente,
the dogs barking under
clear stars, the

locomotive flares
his big hot orange
fire on sleeping
houses in the glade
— sweet California —
memories of Marin
& the California night
are true & real —
& were right
And then I went
South to Mexico

And then I went North
to New York

To New York, to the
Apple, New York

(Remember, this isnt chronological)
Mexico December ’52

Plant without growth
in Vegetable bleakness

The thirst, the mournfulness

The terrible benzedrine
depression after big
night of drinking on
Organo St. with
La Negra & the
courtdancer queer
children after whore
sluffed me & I lost
brakeman’s lantern,
French dictionary,

earmuff hat, money,
pages of writing,
left piss in my
new pots & walked
off — long rides
in perfect Mexico
on bus, sad — but
at Tamazunchale
begin to feel good &
see Kingdoms & homes
& heavy syrup air
of jungle —
& at Brownsville
Missouri Pacific bus — &
then VICTORIA

“SIRONIA” —
my walk — miss’t
bus — saw Xmas
in rose brown
r.r. track
windows —
Sweet stars —
presaging months
in Winter 1953
Richmond Hill at
Ma’s house writing
gemlike
LOVE
IS
SIXTEEN

After which flew
back to Coast to
work mountains
at San Luis Obispo
puttin up & down
pops — ending I
sail out the Golden
Gate on a Japan
bound freighter that
first goes to New
Orleans where I
drink & take off
(“Worlds Champion
shipjumper,” says
Burroughs) & return
NY in summer, to
heat & Subterraneans

& Alene Love
& eventual
RAILROAD EARTH
book of Fall
Come - Christmas
O rushing
life,
restless gyre,
seas, cots,
beds, dreams,
sleeps, larks,
starlights, mists,
moons, knowns —

SKETCHES WRITTEN IN ST. LOU IS-TO-NEW YORK AIRPLANE

Winter in No. America,
the sun is falling
feebly from the
South.

Getting rooked of all
my money trying to
get home for Xmas
in time — for a
childhood chimera
blowing all my pay —
flying TWA — Lemme
see, can I find
Jay Landesman’s
saloon?
it’s going to be
a Merry Xmas
one way or the
other

Winter in No. America,
the passengers on the
right in the TWA plane
have a sea of incandescent
milk blinding
in their eyes, from
where the feeble
South American sun
comes raying, plus
the dazzling sun
ball herself, but
on the left, on eastbound
58 out of St. Louis,
on the fireman’s
side, they see the pale
blue North out the
window, also blinding,
but more seeable —

It’s like facing the
snow on the North side
of the train eastbound
in the morning, in a
strange New England
of snow created by the
ice-cap of overcast
covering the Eastern
lake & seaboard —
like Greenland, from
the top of one of
its highest coastal
mountains seeing
below the enormity
of the continental
inland polar snow
field a thousand,
two thousand miles long —
a field of clouds,
no buttercups there;
a glacier of
fiery mad vapor
extending in the
air sea. Down
on the world Premier
Mossadegh cried.
Notre Dame, Terre
Haute, Africas
below. Unbelievable
endless solid floor
of clouds.

SOUNDS IN THE WOODS

Karagoo Karagin
criastoshe, gobu,
bois-cracke, trou-or,
boisvert, greenwoods
beezy skilliagoo
arrange-câssez,
cracké-vieu,
green-in buzz
bee grash —
Feenyonie
feenyom —
Demashtado
— — Greeazzh —
Grayrj —

Or — where a festive
fly makes a blade
of grass snap —
Or — Hurried ant
flies over a leaf —
Or — Deserted village
clearing of my sit
Or — I am dead
Or — I am dead
because everything
has already happened
I must go ahead
beyond this dead
to —
the ground

to —
the vast
to —
the moss of the
Babylon woodstump
to —
mysterious destruction
from —
blisters
bellies
stockings
fingers with hair
tans
sores
muddy shoes
Seulement pas, S.P. —
Aoo reu-reu-reu-
a bee —

The Woods Are Ave of Me

Ant town antics
Joan is dead
The flup fell down
I have an ant
criolling thru
the rot
stump
“Yey” voice
of human child
“oh! — ” Zzzz
Finally: -
Degradled fling lump
stick stump motion
bump in the brother
mump of —
skreeee — lump —
Terre vert —
sflux — seeee —
Spuliookatuk —
Speetee-vizit,
vizit (bird) —
Vush! the whole
forust! Zhaam
Sabaam Vom —
V-a-a-m —
R-a-o-o-l —
m-n-o-o-l-
z-oo — ZZAY —

Tickaluck — (Funny)
fiddledegree — R-R-
R-R-Rising vrez
Zung blump
dee-dooo-domm —
Deelia-hum —
Baralidoo —
Spitipit — spitipit —
Ahdeeriabum, ah
grey —
Vee!
Eee-lee-lee-
mosquilee —
Rong big bong
bee bong —
Atchap-pee
Atchap-pee
Skior! Viz!
Sit!
Deria-po-pa!
Hit-ta-
tzi-po-teel,
Te de li a bo —
Vit! chickalup!

Oooeeeuoom
Vazzh —
V-a-z-z
Flip flip flip flup
Bung ground terre

Doo-ri-oo-ri-oo-ra

Zee —
Krrrrrr — r-o-t
Crick
Fueet!?
Fueet!? _ _ _ _
Written in Easonburg
woods, at one point naked,
Sunday, Aug 10 1952
— The Sounds of the Woods

PARANOIA AND OIL

When Buz Sawyer
goes to South America
representing Americans
who only think in
terms of paranoia & oil.
— bkfast. in the
best hotel is only a
time to read the paper,
across the park it’s
empty & just a
paranoiac Indian
photographer — he
talks over the
phone with Mr Boss,
avoids women —
Woogh!

WATSONVILLE, CALIF.

Mechanized Saturday
night — the foggy
Watsonville Main Drag on
the Mexican side has
people on the sidewalks
milling but Mexican field
& section hands dismally
knowing they cant find
love till they return to
Mexico, just wander, &
mostly look into workclothes
stores (!) like I do and
a group of anxious Indians
finished with the beet
& lettuce season have
bought an enormous suitcase
at the Army Navy
store & are going home
to stern fathers

& good mothers who
have taught them
gentleness & the Virgin
Mother so they dont
clack around wise guys
like the Mexican American
Pachucos — but only
have great sad eyes
searching into the lost
blue eyes of America,
& in the “American”
part of the Main Drag
there are no people,
empty sidewalks, empty
pink neons for bars
(like Sunnyvale) just
cars in the street — a
mechanized Saturday,

with occupants who
look anxiously out for
companionship of Sat
nite mill crowds but
the steel of the
machines is walling them
off — argh!
Meanwhile I dig
the woman in her
sad furnished room above
Mex Mainstreet, her
little boy in window
looking out on the whiteness
& mystery of
Nov. 8, 1952 — & the
old wood building’s been
covered at front with
plaster — She’s in the
window in her pink
dress, radiant, transparent,
lost — I would be
great if I could just
sit in a panel truck
sketching Main Streets
of world — will do.
God will save me
for what I do now,
help my Mom —
he will —

In his idealistic youth on
railroad in Maine Old Bull
says “Why should I have a
radio when I can hear
the music of a crackling fire
& the steam engines in
the yard?” — railroad Thoreau
— he sits alone in his
caboose, in the dark, with
the fire, drinking — Old
Bull Baloon the Man
of America — Guillaume
Bernier of Gaspé —
& says “All that
matters is the healthy
color of that fire” —
but too much bottle,
not enough sottle, brings
him to his last late
years —

TITLE: - THE MORTAL UGLINESS

The Mortal Story
(Haunted Ugly Angles of Mortality)

Did I ever get my
kicks as a kid with
date pie & whipt cream
combining with “Shrine
North South All star
football game Christmas
night in the Orange Bowl”
— dug sports then
as something rich
& at its peak on
holidays when
it went with turkey
dinners & peach shortcake
— Also, remember
the joyous snowy mornings
when you played
Football Game Board
with Pop & Bobby
Rondeau? — the oranges
& walnuts in a bowl,
the heat of the house,
the Xmas tinsel on
the tree, the boys
of the Club throwing
snowballs below
corner Gershom —
Moody? —
On the Road that
if you will, Sex
Generation that
if you will —

Made Sick by The Night

My Father Was a Printer

The trouble with
fashions is you want
to fuck the women
in their fashions
but when the time
comes they always
take them off so
they wont get
wrinkled.

Face it, the really
great fucks in a
young man’s life was
when there was no
time to take yr.
clothes off, you
were too hot & she
was too hot — none
of yr. Bohemian leisure,
this was middleclass
explosions against
snowbanks, against
walls of shithouses
in attics, on sudden
couches in the lobby —
Talk about yr. hot peace

The Sea is My Brother —
a figment of the gray
sea & the gray America,
of my childhood dreams —

Walked from Easonburg
on old walking-road but
3 miles — in gray thrilling —
with bag — saw Negro
pulled by a mule on a
bike! — to junction 64,
immediate ride young hot-
rod speedsters to Spring
Hope, pickt up Wake
Forest boy too — he
got off, went downroad
— Hotrod told, as he
went 90, of man
tried pass truck hit

school child & turned
over — Old thin bum
at S Hope, hitching east,
from Atlanta, “Almost
got stuck in old car 10
miles out” — A blond
husky Hal Chase-truck-
ride to Raleigh, arr. 4:30
P.M. — hates South —
nothin to do, bars close
— New Caledonia, Louis
Transon, Noumea —
he said is Paradise —
— A bleakness I dont
like in air — dull
trees of Raleigh —
I feel forsaken —
Old goodhearted taxi-
driver to corner — Curious
Raleigh Judge-type
to corner —

Girls crossing — man
stops — Relief mgr
of restaurants —
Corn likker test, up
in Old Port — Mickey
Spillane, Faulkner —
Is going to rest finally at a
steady Maryland restaurant
— Then young kid in
old truck, married, who in
1946 hitched to Wash. State
with $500 & came back
with 21¢ — Then
incredible beat old car
with old fat bum, one
mile, incredible heat
from motor, incredibly
dirty shirt — Then
2 bleak eternal bakery

workers driving home dogtired
from work thru red clay
cuts of Time, with wine
faintly in gray western
horizon, beefing about work
— I thought “Why do
you want men to be
better or different than
this” — One talked, other
didnt; one urged, other
brooded; left me off
at truckstop road to
Greensboro N.C. — broke
$5 on coffee — “Dinning Room”
Tics of Eternity
called me buddy — good
hearted Charley Morrisettes
of Time — I must find
langue for them — frazzly
eager one & Charley Mew-
Leo Gorcey used-out legended
ripened-beyond sad fat one
— O Lord

Great big G.J. burper picked
me up in the rain, dark —
after I talked to old bum
(70) in railroad hat who
said country was worse off
than in 1906 (truckdriver
from Liberty Tex. to
Baton Rouge worried Mex,
called it “tarpolian”)
— GJ burper in new
huge Chrysler, was Chief
in Navy gun crews on Liberties,
also bought requisition
food (for Bainbridge Officers),
at North River wholesale
houses — ate 5 pound steak
— ate 2 lobsters
at Old Union Oyster House,
Boston — used to
screw redhead at 7 PM
on her beauty parlor couch —
used to beat up queers in
Washington — Drove me
into bloody Western horizon
beyond rain (!) into the
glittering Lowell town of
Greensboro, gave me card
Robt J Simmons Lily
Cup Corp. — to Salvation
Army — was only gym,
old Negro born in Hollywood
(“used to have a show
on the corner with my
sister & etc.”) directed
me accurately “That
Esso Sign, this side,
them real bright lights,
707 Billbro St. —
bed & breakfast” —
Sho enuf — a little
ramshackle house —
dorm bedroom — man
was 50, thin, gray; Red
got up in undershirt —
to talk about routes

(“No sir, Winston Salem
to Charleston waste your
time, you in Charleston
& Bluefield & you in the
mountains” — hanging
bulb, table, pictures of
wanted criminals on
flowery wallpaper —
bathroom — “take
70 right on down the
river — ”) Tennessee
River, from Knoxville to
Nashville — rain
starts — go to bed
at 9 — no eat — talk

with Red an hour about
rolling, wandering, sleep
police stations, quit jobs,
drink whiskey, itch —
etc. — Dream all
night wild dreams of
big Chicago Salvation
Army with wild young
gang with me, & girl
horrors of my
wallet, Salvation Army
underwear — incredulously
all over me I see six
inch long & thick sponges
of fungus growing off
me — so awful I dont
believe it even in
dream — spectral happenings,
cellar, stairs,
rooms, bathroom, girl, boys,
wallet, (had it in my
pillow case so Red mightnt
steal it) — Up at 6:30
“Gotta go” says boss
— breakfast: 2 coffees,
weak, cornflakes &
evap. milk — & my banana
— & blowing drizzle out
but I go — & get spot
ride to junction — & get
slow ride to High Point,
dampwet, dry in car
man was at New
Zealand & Melbourne,
— dry further in
High Point Greek
lunchcart with mottled
marble greasy counter

& aged grill & fry
smells & comfort, with
steamy windows redglow
redbrick Hi Point but
gotta roll —
(I got in that truck,
driver said “I’m quittin
my job so the hell
with the insurance spotters,
less roll” —
bums in SA) — always
say, for truck driver,
less roll —
I got $4.85
Blank Universe stared
me on Main Hiway out of
Greensboro — storm rose —
driving wet drizzly winds —
I was positive I was lost —
faces of passing cars — Staring
porch people — bakery trucks —
but I got a spot ride
to junction — & there in
storm, got ride to High Point
— but woops, already wrote
this — Walked clear to
Furniture factories at junction,
& stood an hour 45 minutes, near
bleak aluminum warehouse
with tin chimnies with
Chinese hats, & smoke, &
Southern RR yards —
& funny Kellostone apt.
house with Italian in-porches
with potted palms, silent
& dismal & unfriendly
in the blank gray day —
Certain again I was
lost — But — ride to

junction from a guy (I
forget now!) — &
there, on open hiway, I
get ride from new car
to Hickory N.C. 90
miles — with furniture
veneer wood agent who
knows Yokleys of Mt. Airy
& talked & was intelligent
(Sheepshead Bay, book review
for High Point etc.) —
at Hickory I was at
foot of my worse trip
— mountains — but had
no time to despair, a
blond hero boy in a
red rocket 88 (’52)
with frizzly dog (half
terryland Terrier & Sheep
dog) — zoomed off to
100 mile straightaway —
was only going to Kansas City
— 1000 miles! — I
helped him drive — we
rolled thru Mountains fast,
thru Asheville (Tom Wolfe
sign on road) — (right
across Woodpen St.) —

to Knoxville, to Louisville
at midnight (pickt up
lost hitch hiker in rain
outside Mt Vernon, Ky.)
— but Oh those Cumberland
Mtns. from Lake City
& LaFollette Tenn. thru
Jellico to almost Corbin
Ky. — dismal, bleak,
I dreamed em, hillbilly
shacks, hairy buttes, smoke,
raw, fog — wow — at
Louisville the great Ohio,

the redbrick wholesale
bldgs., soft night, — cross
to New Albany, Ind.,
where I drove straight
across the Vincennes etc.
to St Louis in the morning —
he drove to Columbia
Mo. — I drove another 60 mi.
to Boonville — outside
Warrenton he wanted to
show — attendant —
ranout gas — on road —
went 117 M.P.H.!!!
Kansas City Kansas at
noon — I lost dark
glasses in his car — wild
kid — KC washed in
station, spent money
on cokes & crackers
& ice cream — ride
to junction — Two Texas

boys work in car shops
for Santa Fe RR in El
Paso drove me Topeka
— got there just as boys
were coming out of
work in Rocky Mt N C
car shops! — moving —
Then Beryl Schweitzer,
Negro All American back
from Kansas State, drove
me to Manhattan Kans.
— we talked — Then
two cowboys, the driver
14, drove to Riley
on Route 24 — talked
about horses, calves, roping,
drinking, girls, cross country
riding on “Satan” their
unshod bronc — etc. — with
red hankies of cowboys
hanging on dashboard in
old rattly car — cowboy
Sam called my seabag
war bag — ! — at
Riley I despaired, got
truck to junction — sun
going down — 2 boys
who come home from work
drove me to Clay Center,
where I ate tuna in
backyard — & it got
dark, I was souldead,
I wanted to die —
so got poorboy port
wine, then $1.75 hotel
room with fan, sink —
right on tracks of R I R R
or C B Q — slept 12
hour log — washed, shaved,
wrote, ate sardines —

500 miles to Denver, I
have $1.46 — but
feel alive again & even
that I will be saved, i.e.,
I am not a dead duck,
not a criminal, a
bum, an idiot, a fool
— but a great poet
& a good man — &
now that’s settled I
will stop worrying about
my position — & — concentrate
on working for stakes
on Sp. RR so I can go
write in peace, get
my innerworld lifework
underway, Part II,
for Doctor Sax was
certainly part one!

Clay Center Window —
creamy snowy silo rising
Farmers Union CO-OP —
green roof & old gables
(once English style) of
Clay Center RR depot —
redbrick 1-story Plumbing &
Electrical Co. — cars
& small trucks parked
on angle — rickety
brokendown shacks on tracks
— rickety graywood oldhouse
under noble trees, signs
on small barn, weeds, piles
of barrels or bldg. material
in back — someone is hammering
on a plank — W P Stark
Lumber Co. hugetruck backin
in a truckstop across the
tracks — fellow in blue
baseball hat in P&E doorway

is jacking up a car — man
in RR hat & man in Panama
talk & watch — sun’s
coming out — US Royal
Farm Tires sign waves
in breeze — small Farmers
Co Op gas truck went
by — Tourists — Small
liquor store, was once gas
station, where I got wine,
white plaster, white fence,
green lawn, looks like
LA realty office —
music from a restaurant
juke — junkyard in distance
— nobody on street
— everywhere the green
balls of trees over roofs
— last night a thousand
birds from the Plains were
yakking in this town — from
the Plains Clay Center is
a cozy nestled settlement
in the Huge —

It’s the thought of Nin
that makes this trip so
sad — my sister didnt
love me, I didnt know
it —
The drink that’s bitter
going down, & sweet in
memory — Life.
I am now stuck
outside Norton Kan.
with no prospect of
any ride, nightfall,
hunger, thirst, death.
Brierly saved my damned
useless life — I went
to Prairie View Kans. in a
truck, in a vale from behind
where I was, phoned
him collect, he’s sending
— but why make a record,
he’s saving me — he expects
to see me & be all excited
in talk & joy — like I
was — but am I dead?
— I want to say to him
“I dont understand what’s
happening — any more —
I dont understand the
dew — I know there is
no Why but I cant help
it — ” But he saved me
— I went from Clay
Center in a car driven by
blond handsome young
reclamation worker — we
drove 60 miles west to
Beloit — I felt very
happy, the land of Kansas
smiled —

days that start good end
up bad — at Beloit I
got a ride from father &
son (father road
worker, apparently drove
to Missouri to fetch him for
holidays, is married to
‘new wife’) — to a
lone-ass junction at
281 — hot killing sun
— no cars — I thought
I was done for (was,
too) — I prayed to be
saved — a man carrying
a carseat load of dead
side beef (smell of
death) saved me —
my meaty dumb bones
— & carried me zipping
to Smith Center —

wrecked his car Feb. 29!
nice old fella — (on 28!)
I know the joy those
little girls’ll remember,
in Prairie View with their
mother — yes I do —
And that cunt’s tall
grandfather — does
my mother think I
dont know those
things? —
Nobody cares —
How can they care
when they dont know?!
— At Smith Center a
ride to a country junction
from a farmer hero
straight profile with
little blond son —

at ice cream stand, the
mother said to her son
“Dont hang around with
him” & I recognized her
face & she mine — mad —
but I got a ride to
(this was off Agra) —
to doomed Phillipsburg
from carload of kids driv
by Marine ex & wife —
Okie — on I go with
dignified father & son
to that lonely hole
on a hill where I
think I die — 2 hours,
no rides, zoom, sun
going down, despair,
— Prairie View in
truck — but later —

I walked in with seabag —
Old falsefront western
wood stores, dirt, or tarred
gravel sandy road Main
Street, cars crunch over
majestically, on review on
Sat. nites — but not a
soul in sight, I’m going
down over prairie hollow
of trees bloodred, birds
thrashing in trees, —
I go to Public Telephone
little old white house,
woman long calls Neal
for me (San Jose), he’s
not home — her husband
in long overalls was
once farmer, gives me
hamburg sandwich huge,
says (& also huge
glass water) — “A man
dont know what to do
anyway.” — Sun goes
down, I wait, — dark,
Prairie Viewers come round
for Satnite, men sit in
front gen’l hardware, some
on ground, talk soft —
little kids hurry to
church suppers or whatever,
mothers — sodafountain
opens, I sit, watch happy
mother & little Gaby Nashua
joy girls — ate my heart —
& crazy castrated lunatic
Wellington chain smoking
stuttering smelling somehow
sweet & open air talks
to me — Ah — “Born
same date & year as
A G Bell a great

intelligent” — “hmph,
a Swede, he’s a Hollander,
there’s Mr. So and so,
barn burned down in ’49”
etc. — Pushes hat back,
wild hair brow pasted, mad,
somehow Fitz, I like
him, he’s intelligent —
“Kansas City was in
street 2 nights — went
to hotel — need 55¢cut
says man — next night,
need 75¢ says man —
okay, — not got it —
pushes me on left shoulder —
out” — “Dont work
any more since my
headaches started” — “Old
Mr Jones lived to be
98 — died a
mile north of that

water tower — couldnt climb
it tho, guess he was too
old — he was a Hollander
too” — Farmers: “Otto
is it? Hello Otto!” yells
Wellington — He’s sensitive
— listens when you talk,
jerks to hear & reply —
We cross street, longpants
niceman driving to six
miles east Norton — Meanwhile
Old Justin’s sending
me $12 Norton — goodbye
— they (longpants &
thin heroboy of Kansas
but sad & attentive) drive
me to hill of Western Nite
— hail down stationwagon
bein whaled at 85 by
wild cunt — fixed me
a ride as only farmer
could — man in car
says “Working late aint
ya?” — (harvest he
thinks) I get out
car — “Thank you sir —
and madame.” Forced
on them — Go to
depot, agent off duty,
raging mad I tear up
handful of folders &
hurl them screaming
across Rock Island tracks
to where sad cows being
waybilled to Santa Fe
moo — I go to Hotel
Kent, get a room, promise
pay morning (first I
rush for wine, Gallo port)
— back — waterf ountain,
grocery store, man

wallet — hotel room hot
— windows — shower
no handles — curse —
dancing below — 5 shots
wine — sleep — cold
in Fall morn — up —
wipe wine from things —
depot — joy of
dark shadow morn on
RR tracks etc. — rush
to WU — back (water
fountain) — cash hotel —
Melroy Cafe huge
bkfast. — go — waitress —
read paper hurricane,
Faulkner crash airshow
“Please keep away —
for Gods sake keep
away” — bus at 5:30!
— I hitch! —
Cursing half hour, deciding
never to hitch
again, to end On The
Road (pure hitching)
with malediction gainst
America — a sunny
funeral director
from Hope Indiana with
particularly irrelevant
old bum carry me
80 mph. to Denver!
— “Believe in helping
out a feller — try to
do God’s will as best
I can — ” Never seen
a rattlesnake or
a mirage till this
ride! — Zoom —
Arrive Denever

ZAZA (Barbershop in Denver)

Zaza’s — blue squares
painted above long
vertical panes, on
glass — says “Baths”
& “1821” — Barber
Shop — little tiny
bulb light over door
on protruding bar, bent —
beat up doorway, gray
paint below the mad
cerulean wash blue
— in window burlesk
ad, whitewashed flowerpot
of tub with soil & crazy
redblossomed weeds —
smaller pots, weeds —

no decoration, just bare
chip-painted weathered
old planks in window-
case, a can with soil
& greentip, — a milk
bottle, empty — a Wildroot
smileteeth ad card, a
sad tablecloth over a
rail — an upsidedown
ancient piece of an ad
card — “Barber Shop”
is flaked half off —
Gaga’s — other
window has ad cards,
same — Inside is wooden
drawers, white — chairs
white & black, old —
cash register — barber
coat over chair — (closed)
— sink, bench — wood
slat wall — calendar
— next to beat
Windsor shoe shop, used
shoes ranged in window

Late afternoon at the New
England Sunday lakes of
my infancy —
The Joe Martin truckdrivers
of the crosscountry Denver
night — old lunchcarts —

Early Autumn in Kansas —
I ate a big breakfast of
sausages, eggs, pancakes,
toast & 2 cups coffee —
hungry on the road — farmers
in the Sunday morning
cafe, the bright sun, the
clarity of a rickety
Kansas town alley outside
— heartbreaking
reminders of Neal Cassady
— “The Energies of
Cody Pomeray”!

Alley: telephone poles,
wires, Firestone tire sign
(flamepink & blue), old
graywood garage door,
redbrick chimney lashed
to a house with bar,
aluminum warehouse, old
streetlamp overhanging —
Norton, Kans. —
Old shacks! — O
America! — What was
it like in Lincoln’s time!
— Where are all the
railroad men of the
19th Century! They’ve
all slanted into the
ground —
The heavy-headed
wheat —

ACROSS KANSAS

Golden fields flaming
with the sunflower —
Thirst-provoking-while-
chewing-gum mirages across
the dry plowed fields —
but a dust-raising tractor
in the middle of a cool
sweet lake is a blatant
lie — “Many poor devils
died trying to reach one of
them” — (driver from Hope)
The immense dry farming
spaces — Maj estical
white silo at Bird City
Kans. — Distant
drunk phone poles —
A thirsty man looks
for mirages!

Colorado — old barn,
red — pile of dry boards,
barrels, tires, cartons —
dry wind, dry locust in
brown grass — old Model
T wreck truck — Wind
sings sadly in its dash-
board — & thru wood
boards of floor — just wood
slats for roof — incredible
erect, skeletal — what
deader than old car?
— haunted by old
dead-now usages —
rusty skinny clutch handle —
no cap — drywood spokes —
old ferruginous mudguards
I write on have tinny
sad ring & sing while
I write — pile of tarred

poles — Cows grazing
in the Plains haze —
sweet long breeze —
horse in the flat —
prairie crickets tipping
— hay mtn. with
old dead wagon 2
wheel — old dead
skeleton plows — wreckages
of old covered wagons are
hinted at in the scattered
junk of backfield — a
backyard to a barn
& station that faces
infinity — tremendous
open dry white sand
square to city, town —
west of Idalia —

The Colorado Plains
horse neighing in immensity —
Ah Neal — the shaggy
whiteface cows are
arranged in stooped
dejected feed, necks
bent, upon the earth
that has a several
mood under several
skies & openings — Ah
the sad dry Land ground
that’s open between
grasses, whip’t bald
by the endless Winds —
the clouds are bunched
up on the Divide of
the horizon, are shining
upon thy city — the
little fences are lonely —

The grassy soft face
of earth has pocks
of canyons, arroyos,
has moles of sage,
has decoration of
aluminum wheat barns,
the one skinny
revolving windmill in
the Vast, — lavender
bodies of the distance
where earth sighs to
round — the clouds
of Colorado hang blank
& beautiful upon the
land divide —
the line of man’s
land is the bleak
line of his Mortality —
soft crunches the cow’s
munch in all eternity
— shining cloud
worlds frowsily survey
the little farm in
rolls immense of
dun scarred breakless
grass — Sadly the
Continental Divide appears,
dark, gray, humped,
on the level horizon —
The first crosser of these
E Colo. wilds first thot of
clouds mountainshaped —
then — “Hey Paw I
been lookin at them
mountains for a hour” —
“I have too, son — unmistakably
mtns. — not
a cloud — ” then the

party went into a long
hollow — came up
again on a rise —
(shaggy gray sensual
cow lazing along) —
but the rise not high
enough — for 5 hours —
: — “guess it was a mirage”
— Next day —
“Yes, a mirage” —
Vast earth flat with
the blushes of the
sun — of God —
God is blushing on
the land — throwing his
tints with a slant
& sweep — & soft —
“Yes, yes, yes, mtns!”
“Unbroken miles of em!”

Over the lavender
land, snake humps —
rock humps — squat
eternal seat forever —
promise of raw fogs —
(the beautiful hump
necked pony, white &
black, with Indian
black strands personalizing
his sweet neck & dark
thoughtful eyes ) —
Vast eternal peak points
there, shy to show their
might till you come up
close — Have deserts
damned up behind em —
— — — clouds vie above
for mountainism —
they go darkening to
Wyoming territory North —
to Nebrasked dark gray
wall sky — cyclones
have formed there —
The sad mountains wait
forever — (heavy-bellied
pendant ringlet cow) —
(Madame Cow) — — —
The land of the Comanche!
I already smell that
Western Sea! — The
mountains (closer) are
misty, bright with
hazel, silver, gold,
territories of aerial
bright hover & bathe
them — Sad dry
river here, helping
out the So Platte —
thru the cities of

railroad & telephone poles
the mountains do cloud
darkly — Now I
see levels of them one
humping upon the other —
Smell the ozone & orgone
of the Plains where
the Mountains appear!
— the mystery of them
is like the gray sea —
because the flats rush
to meet them — &
traffics hasten seaward —
The pale gold grass of
afternoon, the cakes of
alfalfa, the hairheads
of green sage in the
brown plowed field, the
poles on the rim —
Snow on the mtns! —

Pure snow & tragedy of
Great Neal’s home
town — Wild sweet
Mannerly of the Night
here rages rushing —
Tiers of mountains supramassing
now — the Event!
Enormous golden rose
clouds far towards
Bailey, Sedalia, &
Fairplay — The
mountains loom higher
— Father, Father! ! —
— Yes son, Yes son —
Lonely lost paths
lead to them over
rollhills of dark &
pale land, Father —

Ah Son the silver
clouds above their
Loom & Huge, the
rains of them, the
sad heaps of them, —
The monstrous block
they’ve made to our
westward grand march
— the flatland is
here upchucked &
rockened to hard —
they swoop & slant,
have sides — The clouds
put on a splendorous
air to oertop these
Kings of Earth — the
wind blows free on
them from this
lone prairie —
Estes has Showers of
light-mist — the
blue cracks to show
open heaven — the
Whole Plain descends
to be foothilled up —
yellow patches show
on those early sides —
beyond is black, &
wall drear, & Berthoud —
distant Pike the Giant
sleeps, black — his
shining snows now shrouded
in gales — Colo Spgs
rooftops are gray &
windswept now — but
Denver is snow, gold,
sun, be-mountained,
won. —

Over the gold wheatflats
they rise blue as mysteries,
sweet, dangerous —
Oh Father the road is
a thread to their knees!
Their mottled hills are
Indian Ponies! The
cornflower prairie is
their carpet of welcome
— Welcome to Bleak —
They are blank &
muscular rock upon
this naked earth —
this earth naked to the
blank sky, flat, opposite
— They oertop
our wagon tops & rooftops
now, & our trees —

their smoky blue make
trees a proper green —
Stay so, tree — Ah
the sad ass of my
Palomino buttocking to
the Great Divide —
In green clover hollows
they fill the opening
with their Merlin lump —
Wild trailer cities
on D’s skirts!
Old 1952! hallo!
— Rockies? the
jigsaw fanciful cliffs
of infant scrawls
are no steeper!
they have sides that
sink like despair & rise
like hope —

with a still point
peak — Motels, Autels,
Trailerlands! — they
huddle on the Plain —
The buildings & motels
far out E Colfax are
so new you couldnt
smear shit on em,
it would fall off!

THE THING I LIKE ABOUT

Chinatowns, you look around,
you see that everybody has
a vice, beautiful vice —
whether it’s O, or wine,
or Cunt, or whiskey —
you don’t feel so isolated
from man as you do
in AngloSaxon Broadways
of Glare & Traffic where
people might be hung up
on shouting preachers, or
lynching, or baseball,
or cars — Gad I hate
America with a passionate
intensity —

I’m going to excoriate
the cocksucker & save
my heroes from its doom.
It aint no atom
bomb will blow up
America, America
itself is a bomb
bound to go off
from within — What
monster lurks there, bald
head, fat, 55, young wife,
millions, Henry J Shmeiser,
out of his pissing cancerous
life will flow (from the
belly) a juice of explosions
— dowagers
& young juicy cunts with
high mannered ways on
buses will gasp — I
stick my finger in the cunt.

America goes ‘Blast’ —
Fine people like Hinkle
will be buried under the
stucco autel ruins — ah —
Lucien will rave —

(Written when I was a railroad brakeman
covered with soot mad as hell in 1952:
I apologize now, America, in 1959, for
such filthy bitterness but that’s what
I said then, and meant it.)

DENVER

The So. Platte at the
CBQ railyards — in
Sept. flows briskly from
the hump mountains
— sand island, — one sad
sunflower — weeds —
mudsides plopping off in
tide — water ripples
fast — banks steep,
dumpy, reinforced with
rocks — pieces of tin
strip, sticks, pipe —
sewage pipes come out —
oil rainbowing the water
— many small beat
bridges — under the
RR bridge an old

concrete foundation, — oily
rocks — driftwood piled,
a-ripple — cans — dirty
pigeons — rock villages —
— on bank old dining
car, red soot, for switchmen
— little trees growing
on the reinforced bank —
but many tree stumps
where trees cut — long
islands of rocks —
fast flows at sides —
above this sad stream
flowing thru iron tragedies
are the brass clouds
of solid Autumn —
Junk: - pile of tires, a child’s
crayon book, broken glass,
coldwind, black burntout
near sewage steam pipe —

bolts, bird feathers, an
old frying pan sitting in the
crook of a bridge girder,
old wire, flat rusty cans
no longer nameable, —
is written on viaduct concrete
wall: “If anybody were
in the Army in August
1942 when I shot
gent Slensa come
ant tell the Sgt.”
(incoherent) — & drawing

in chalk of profile
with cloth cap, plaid,
top bop button, a
strange Skippy —
“All Judge
Suck Pussy”

Field of weeds, a plain
facing “The Centennial
School Supply Co.” — “The
Mine & Smelter Supply
Co.” — aluminum sooted
tanks — red tin sooted
sheds — boxcars —
concrete silos — redbrick
warehouses — chimneys —
& Denver skyline behind
not seen — in weeds is
piece of rope, piece
of car window stripping,
nameless rusty perforated
tinhunks, newspaper, old
fold of handtowel
paper, old Jewel
Salad Oil carton,

a pile of junk, — & the
girders of the viaduct have
great black bolt heads
like knobs of a
sweating steel black
city, — gray overcast
clouds, cold — pipe
of engine, steam hisses,
cars skippitybumping
overhead, clang bells,
iron wheel squeals,
rumbles, — over the
silent mtns. a bird —

Near the Lee Soap
Co. is a collection of
ruined shacks — slivered
burntout by time boards
skewered, under the
viaduct, cartons &

newspapers inside where
old boys slept — old
bottle Roma wine —
Old Purefoy Cassady
slept here — many
cans of many a
pork n beans supper —
strange festive weeds
with big cabbage
leaves & bunchy green
substance you could
roll into seeds between
palms — slivers of
wood cover ground —
old rusty nails long ago
hammered now lie
uppointed to heaven &
forgot —

A bum fire, sweet smoke
scent — Inside shack:
abandoned child toilet
seat! — Royal Riviera
Pears box — flashlite
battery — hole plugged
with cardboard but
boards spaced an inch —
The thrill of old magazines
time soaked — a
haunted village — wood
of crossbeam this door
is decayed where nails
went in, mould of dusts,
tiny webby darkgray
Colorado shack color,
a big old Rocky Mtn.
tree overhangs — this
was once a thriving

Mexican or cowhand
camp settlement — mebbe
a big Mex family now
gone — Beautiful
lavender flowers 5 foot
hi in rich erotic weeds

— A redbrick shack
with torn “Notice” —
hints of onetime smiling
people now the shithole
beneath the
viaduct of Iron America
in which at last I
am free to roam —
Come on, boys!
(Old Black Flag insect
Spray! — for particular
hobos! — but thrown
from viaduct — )

Deserted House — on
tar road, many of
em — around back —
great weeds — incredible
cellar stairs leading to
black unspeakable hole
not for hobos but escaped
murderers! — Shit on
floors — papers, magazines
— Ah the poor sad
shoes of some thin
foot bum — weary
with time — scuffed,
browned, cracked, but
good soles & heels only
a little edgeworn —
wine bottles — a
pocketbook “Trouble
at Red Moon” —
Old newspaper with

faces of tragic Mexicans
in hospital beds of
the moment — now upstare
this bleak roof
torn — old bum in
topcoat came in —
“Boys be around a
little later” — old
Bull Durham pouches —
planks — trains go
by outside — plaster —
Boys who were coming were
2 Indians — one roundfaced,
dungarees — one thin, tragic,
seamed, Colorado Wild,
with workpants, jacket,
red bandana & strange
rust red suede cowboy
slope hat of the Wides
— coming across UP
tracks with big bags

(of sandwiches probably)
— tied up with old white
bum who had strange high
voice, was Irish, old but
only 45, rednose, tremendously
hopeless, didnt talk to me,
went next room, read
or scanned thru floor
reading — what a movie
of the Gray West I there
missed! — never felt the
thrill of the West
more since childhood days
of gray tumblewagon serials
in the Merrimac Theater
— cold, cold wind —
Wazee, Wynkoop, Blake,
Market — dismallest of
streets with RR track each
side, parked boxcars,
coldwinds blowing down
from all the gray Wyomings,

sheds with stairs, redbrick
bldgs., shacks, deserted —
poor little Neal in this
night! — and the alleys!
oertopped thickly with
telephone double pole
lines, barrels, concrete
paving, dismal, long, cold,
leading to gray Raw
each way — Then
Larimer, corner 19th,
Japs, — cluttered dark
pawnshops with tools,
guitars, lanterns, (some
unusable), rifles, knives,
stoves, bolts, anything
— & a poor Negro
couple quietly talking &
speculating as they walk in
to sell something, their
children will hear of it
one day the down & out past

— beat Negros pile in
car, “see ya later,” garage
Negro walks on, “Cool”
— but says Cool emphatically
& like a revolution —
Two itinerants standing
outside Pool Parlor still
closed 9 30 AM, everybody
cold — Coffee
shop — cafe — next to
Windsor — old bum in
faded Mackinaw eating
big breakfast gravely
with grizzled sorrow —
younger men — coffee 5¢
— sugar & cream put in
for you etc. — Windsor
lobby cold, gloomy —
painting of constellation
of faces around Windsor,
Cody, Edwin Booth,
Lily Langtry, Baby Doe,

Oscar Wilde — Ah
this is all the Jack
London gray — Deep
dark stairways blood
mahogany — bums sit
around — one man at
bar — talk across 50
foot lobby — once a
great splendour is now
mutter hall of hoboes
— clerk at sumptuous
desk paces & whistles —
bums huddle in gray entrance
to smoke & see
out, hands a pockets
— rattle rasp of
a truck out there, I
sense the gray cold
tragedy of N’s boyhood
— & its joy, too,
as he showeth —

Bums sit forever, with
that hurt look, angry —
smoking — waiting — immovable
from their position —
different type looks
out door humbly, waiting
for he knows not what,

— old tottering tall bum
in plaid shirt with
squinty look of bewilderment
— old painter
bum in white coveralls
struggles thru door —
men with hats, coats, hands
a pockets, sauntering — some
of em weatherbeaten, hard,
rough looking, Canyon City
was their most recent
home —

Glenarm poolhall —
rubber floor full of
holes, boards show — ancient
lost linoleum under —
tables have hanging baskets
like balls — Pederson’s —
old tin panel ceiling,
tan color — cue racks —
pissery in corner hid by
partition — greentop card
tables where Holmes
in bleak poolhall time
sat dealing blearfaced
& grim — “Onlooker’s
bench” pale green, high,
sand jars — Candy
counter, open phone
booth panels, juke —
parkinglot across street —
Denver Bears on
summernight radio —

click, bounce balls on
hard, laughs, “God-damn!”
— husky voices — Stomp of
feet angling around tables
— shuffle of shoes —
“Let’s go, let’s go!” —
voices of adolescents —
crash of break — “Shhhhhit”
— impatient knock of
cuestick on floor —
bop — click of ball
in basket — pocket —
Blackboard near counter
— groups of voices,
Street — Hotel DeWitt
— flash of liquor store
neons — Drake (blue)
hotel (red) down right,
cold — Bright orange
Chinese neons up left of
city center — Denver
Auto Park, lot, old redbrick
Hotel Southard one wall,
DeWitt (brownbrick white
bordered) other — over
head wire bulbs in lot —
Above poolhall Acme Hearing
Aid Co. whitewashed brick
— barber pole — (left)
Hotel Glenarm pink neon
on redbrick (right) —
Mirobar corner — (flashing) —

Counter — old bronze gilded
cash register — framed
licenses near coathanger
hooks — dark brown cabinet
— cigar counter with Tops,
White Owls, Red Dot — El
Producto — King Edward —
signs in entrance glass sides
low Coca Cola, Whistle

Oh Lord in heaven above
what a holy moment, coming
to Neal & Carolyn’s house in
the gray fog day of San
Jose, nobody in, the 9
room sadhouse, the old
Green Clunker filled with
California Autumnal leaves
like the prophetic old
birdhouse wreck of old
travels & sorrows — & finding
all alone in the house
Eternal house little John
blond & beautiful as an
Angel, taking him up,
a spot of Tokay, sit
by the radio with him
& have there on my
lap all that’s left
of my life, as if he
were my blood son.

And he looks just like
Carolyn — how sad
the ten-balled years,
how toppled the pin
of myself — what
Gray Sorrows of Autumn
for this sailing soul
— and for Cassadys,
nothing but love &
attention — bearded
doom boy Jack in Old
Jose, walked from
Easonburg Carolina —
with $5 — & came
to the Angel child that
was not afraid of the
Shroudy Stranger.

FRISCO Embarcadero Sept 8
Cold fog winds blowing
from the wreathed hills
of houses, I can see
the blazing fog shagging
over from old Potato Patch
in a cold whipped blue
— bay waters clear to
Oakland are ripple & keen
blue & cold looking — the
wind even whistles — The
majestic Mormacgulf with
her creamy white masts
& rigging in the pure blue
sits before me, a rusty
redpaint waterline on
the green Jack London
swell of old piers —

Cold wind brings hints of
all the good food in Frisco
(& maybe all the love,
& surely all the hate) —
Mormacgulf is tied
with great cables, a
ratguard broke loose near
the bowsprit canvas and
bangs like a tin pan
in the wind — Water
rushes gushing from a low
scupper — In the water
is bread, a leaf of cabbage,
a butt —

SP train at night

The local — sweetsmelling
night soots — crashby
dingdang of opposite
train — the pink neons
of Calif., the cocktail-
glass-&-mixer neon of
the ginmills — The hills
of supper lights — the
blear of fogs in from the
brown gaps — blear of
lights — Redwood City to
Atherton, clear, clean
night, with magic stars
riding the dark over the
homes of the railroad
earth — plenty time —
I must believe in the lives
of people & the history of
their reality — I must become
a historian —

observe the history of society
& write histories of the world
in wild hallucinated prose
— but a record of the
angels personalizing all the
haunted places I have
seen, written for the angels
not the publishers & readers
— a complete history of
my complete inner life,
also — Wail of the
train, chipachup of the
locomotive steams when
they open a vestibule door
— brakes haul up train,
old ornate browngreen coach
sways — Brown seats
of sticky stuff —
California Spanish neat
cut houses & Launderettes
& modernistic groceries
in the leafy black —

nameless newbrick mortuaries
or grass conservatories
or waterworks with
Shrouds — Oh old train,
Wail my Lowell back,
wail for my Lowell, make
my Lowell my only come-
back — Palo Alto, taxis
at bushéd sidewalk, lights
evenly pinpointing in a
main drag, — Dodge Plymouth
paleblue sign exactly the
one at Letran corner
in Mexcity — but with
beautiful bloodclot glow
Don Hampton beneath —
Strings of yellow bulbs
in car lot — A sudden
view of muddy wood
supports litup in the
construction night —

Spectral palegreen greenhouse
of a factory — Her
I dont like & dont have
to like & wont — Fuckups
have a choice they make,
in naked silence — I
have never been a romantic
lover like him because
I do not like to moo &
screw — I like straight
relations no show all
balls come & comfort —
the slightest sadism makes
me sicken — I am a
hero — Distant bloodred
antennas of Calif. —
Murder will out among
these beasts — that
puffed feather She —

I like my women tragic,
silent, & ravenous souled
— Angel of Mercy,
come to swirl my brain
& teach me the truth &
what to do now, I pray
thee from dark & ignorance
— In darkness reeling I
see bare naked ledge of
oldbrown wood lit by
streetlamp, brown, dim —
Distant geometric modern
bluebright factory of
aircraft windows — The
star of my fame & pity
following far above — Lights
of spread parks illuminating
lonely bits of walks
— Green lights too — the

whistle calls on ahead —
Why did Sebastian live so
intensely & romantically
just to die blear-eyed —
he was saved from middleaged
baggy eyed ends — The
Old SP’s all I got now,
Sam — I had loved you &
you me — Edie, I loved
you too, deeply — The
old stained glass of the
coach, the smoky tan
round ceiling, the barbershop
chairs, the engine calling
for our mountains & all
that’s lost & was supposed
to happen & didnt — Ah
James Joyce, Proust,
Wolfe, Balzac — I’ll
combine you in my forge —

Lovers like X. & Y. — simper
like snakes
WAITING FOR 146 AT
CALIF. AVE.
Backsteps Caboose (crummy)
bloodred — hills seaward
smoke shroud — sun orange
on its flare — Palo
Alto bank bldg. — steam
hiss, silence — the long
track Southeast — the
quiet Calif. cottages —
old paintchip trailer
in backyard, overturned
car junk, abandoned
cab (black, white), clothes-
lines with pins on —
Drive-In — Restaurant —
Green with modern ranch
style redwood sections,
Swift’s Ice Cream neon
in window, big bamboo
blinds in window, cars
parked around — Sunday
afternoon in San Jose,
late sun, the haunted
mountains from the East
rim of Santa Clara
Valley appear only after
a second take look,
dim, yellowish, faintly
rilled, round, bare as
flesh, humping softly
far over the flat of
fruit trees — Beyond
Drive In the night

lights of a ballpark —
traffic on road — Shadows
of pretty girls passing
inside Drive In — new
cars everywhere, & lots
— lost spiritualities
of America dulled &
buried in this last
barbaric land — empty
of meaning but rich,
fruitful, golden, — (the
land is) —
Original home of the
Tender Indian — the Pomo —
O Dostoevsky of
Indian Milleniums! —
Christian Fellaheen
Peotl Saint!

NOTES ON THE MILLENIUM OF THE HIP FELLAHEEN Oct. 1952, Calif.

With historical basis in this: -

(1)America is a pseudomorphological wave laid over the land of the culture-less Fellaheen New World Indian

(2)The American Race is West European, Faustian, Late Civilized, Decadent

(3)Faustian West will destroy itself; the New World Earth will return to its original Indian & Fellaheen

(4)The Indian is one with the Fellaheen World Belt thru Mexico, Africa, Aramea, the Near East, Mohammedan lands, India, China, Korea, the Primitive & the Fellah joined in one Underground Mankind beneath Western & Russian Marxist heels — cultureless, non-critical, simplicity Mankind

(5)The prophet & saint of the World Fellaheen Future is a man of simplicity & kind heartedness & clarity; the various levels of the human godhead are defined in the separate religions which give decency

& richness in blank & blind
Eternity with everybody
waiting. Wm. Blake, &
Dostoevsky are of the same
Church! Jesus Christ & the
black Cunt are reconciled,
the Virgin Mary is painted
on the back of an immense
hardon of gesso plaster
in the hut home of my
Culiacan host, Mexico.

NOTE

(1) The Russian Christian of the next 1000 years belongs to the Aramaean Springtime of the Soul

(2)The Aramaean Springtime of the Soul coincides with the Millenium of the Hip Fellaheen which has in it the seeds of the Antichrist

(3)The next great conflict will be between Hip & Christ, will be resolved in the dark

The Millenium of the Hip
Fellaheen has the subtle
AntiChrist in it — it
is not serious Finally —
Not Race, but the Types,
in Fellaheen Form, is
Discernible; the slope
shouldered cowboy switch
man in dungarees, low
rolled sleeves & brim
hat is the same
type as the samebuilt
Indian driving a Mexico
City bus or lost in endless
meditation on the desert.

The types come & go &
never change, but history
changes; it is history
laid the pallor over the
face of same-built
Radio City executive — the
history of his Race. But
he who surmounts his race,
& sits beneath history, is
Fellaheen. Funny ideas.
The realization of the
death of a comrade is
Jesus; the Millenium
of Christ; the surprised
news of the death
of a comrade is Hip . . .
Hip is Half.
Meek is Full — or Whole

The Millenium of the Meek (Fellaheen)

Hip, & Culture, is Arrogance

Hip is the final Dionysian culture
or cult-form in the decaying
West Arm of Europe —
it wears a subtle mask, it
covers nothing.
Fellaheen is Meek & Rages
like a Beast — the faces
of matricides in Athens
or Cairo afternoon editions;
over the hot rooftops a
woman wails.
The (Purely) Meek Shall
Inherit the Earth — the
Children of God
Children of Jesus
of the Son of Man

A mankind of saints shall
occupy the final Earth,
in endless contemplation of
Heaven —
Hip Fellaheen will lead
to Meek Fellaheen, souls
sitting round a fire in
the open night
All this (My Kingdom
is Not of This World) is
why 1947 was the
“happiest” year of
my life.
Now no more tea,
but contemplation of
Good & Evil —
Lust & Sorrow

Burroughs the Boss of
the Jungle —
Carr the Boss of World
News —
Ginsberg the trembling
Saint of the City —
Cassady the worker
of the wheel on the
land & cunt-man
Kerouac the Pilgrim
of the Meek Fellaheen
Huncke: - criminal hipster
Joan Adams: - the Heroine
of the Hip Generation
John Holmes: - the
Western “writer” &
“critic” — late Civilization
anxieties & word-torrents —
Solomon: - Megalopolitan
High Jew Enigma

The Gospel of the Meek
Fellaheen, Bringing History
Round to Jesus, Begins in
Sweet Actopan — &
ends there

I love the railroad
because it is laid out on the
land, & requires the
eyes of Indians — but
the Rail is Evil
“Brother have you seen
starlight on the rails?”
“Yes” — but,
the greatness of Wolfe
must have been in his
realization of the land —

Come face to face with
the lonely grave now,
beyond it is Heaven
— the lonely hole you’ll
lie in is the only hole
you’ll have — round it
God has woven golden
rewards the Fabric
of His Glory —
My father only now
is blinking his eyes on
the other side of Light —
Jesus loved the
Individual —
America is Decoration
now — planted palms in
San Jose —

The City fattens on
the blood of Towns,
then bursts. The
Atom Bomb, or its
satellite Power, will
destroy New York City
& all of Western Civilization
from Marxist-
Faustian Vladivostok
westward round the
globe to San Francisco.
Then the Millenium
of the Hip Fellaheen
begins, in all lands.
But Eden Heaven
awaits the Milleniums
of the Meek Fellaheen
for all time
The Mankind of Saints,
that shall come after
& finally.
The Men from Mars
are really the baldheaded
bespectacled
lobsters of American
business. — really &
seriously — their
beady eyes, in fat,
glint on the grave —
Rocky C.
A boxer with the
sadness of a saint
Faustian society had
good intentions

The latest sounds in
hip bop are exactly
like the latest developments
in N.Y. Advertising
— the latest ad shows
an empty Coca Cola
bottle, a model with
a black patch over his
eye; these trivial things
are really milestones in
the History of Advertising
in Western Civilization, &
are momentous in the
concerned (Balzacian) circles;
in Eternity of the Meek
Fellaheen they have no
more meaning than that
a walnut fell on the
head of the Patriarch this
morning — or the

Messiah’s pants fell off
the chair —

SKETCH

Crazy California of my
Selma days — tracks
of old SP shining in hot
birdy-tweeting breezy afternoon,
De Jesus & Rodriguez
market of white stucco
with cars parked (2) in
driveway & sign (same
as above, over PAR-T-PAK
board) — I see a
whole bookshelf of wine
bottles, GALLO too — &
here in field, in matted
brown grass under an
avocado tree, I see

an empty Gallo Tokay
fifth & fillet of herring
can & beer cans showing
a royal feast of hoboes
in their California, &
bed-down grass of their
reclinations — In De
Jesus (Vegetable, Meats)
I see a woman selecting
a brace of Cokes — a
car parks — across road
is Ferry Morse Seed Co.,
all spectral iron hell
red last night with
browndeep clouds of
locomotive steam in
Faustian sky —
A little strange SP
handtruck (handcar)

(in Kansas Rock Island
boys say “Nothin to
worry about but a nigger
on a handcar” — pricks)
goes by, with 5 Mex
Indians, one Negro —
they point to rails for
foreman Mex who has
sledgehammer — a Jet
screams above, from
Moffett Field — upper,
paler B-29 groans —
— Seed
Co. is modern flat
plant, nobody in
sight, the machine
silent in the red sun, —
At night not a
human in sight,
just cars smooth in the
hiway, the rails gleaming,
cruel & cold to the touch,
slightly sticky with
steel death, — lights of
airport pokers, distant
roar of Jets in wind
tunnels, far off joints
slamming, planes carrying
Edison’s light across the
stars & freights of
Machine Humanbeings —
& the block lights in
the night that give
panic or peace
according to the
switch points as
manipulated — too
much iron, too much

for me — but in
afternoon, De Jesus &
the Tokay wine, the
roadbed rocks have little
silver gleams & waving
dry tendrils of interspersed
grass & crazy shuddering
little flowers & crackly
wind-weeds & pieces
of wood, hand towel
paper, cellophane
chip bags, gum wrapper,
little ants that bite —
the juice of the grape
stored darkly in the
cool interior store, I’m
wantin a poorboy —
Beyond pink brick Seed
Co. with its streamline

built in windows that
hide controlled vibrating
horror (Rocky Mt. Mills)
is a field of fruit trees,
iron & barbwire fenced
from precious Company —
little white cottages of
the railroad earth, with
end of day papa car
parked, little fruit
trees — haze of
sun — I’m sitting
by silver painted SP

Telephone box & eq’pt —
wearing workshoes, asbestos
gloves now black,
soiled timetable, thick
socks, ankle strap from
swollen ankle missing

bottom climb bar &
falling on rocks in
grim railroad dark —
blue work pants, too
tight, — gray workshirt,
— baseball hat for sun
— dreaming of my
$500 stake & Mexico
& the Millenium of the
Hip Fellaheen this winter
bla bla —
The Millenium of
the Meek Fellaheen

The intensity of D. H.
Lawrence was not carnal

A woman’s cunt is
the soft avenue to her
womanhood, the godhead
of human generations,
the yearning point
of man — I believe
the celibacy in the
teachings of Christ were
Paulist & Jewish-Castration
-Circumcision cult
in origin — for if His
Kingdom is not of this
World, & the Soul is to
be Saved, it makes that
difference inside a
woman’s legs when her
permission is given —

Neal’s Pornographilia
is religiously intense —

The Phallic Cults
worship generation of
the species; the Aramaean
worships its Salvation

Jesus did not say,
but I believe in a
woman’s permission

Retirement annuities
that grow out of group
life insurance & hospital
plans & sick benefits, sponsored
by the modern big
company, are only an
attempt to cut out turn-
over of employees —
imagine devoting yr. entire

life, its soul & meaning
to a pineapple company
& accepting its retirement
annuities for reward —
“Stay with the Machine,
boys, dont need to run
away or shift to other
cogs, you’re just as well
off in this one — we offer
YOU SECURITY TILL THE
GRAVE.” — never mind
the Saviour, he never took
a shower. This company-
sponsored insurance, that
takes bites out of the
victims’ pay all their
lives to support itself (the
money clangs hollowly
from the Machine’s

twidget to the Machine’s
twadget) is called
protection — protection
against their being left
to drift free outside the M.
(M. for machine).
Big Business in Late
America prides itself on
growing figures, just as
a spokesman for the
Golden Age, “the American
Explosion,” points with
pride at the 3 inches
added height average of
American kids.
If not the highest,
then it’s the “fourth
highest” etc.

The faces & demeanors of
successful young American
businessmen: - a guarded
sense of one’s own
gentlemanness — the
face taut & ready to
smile the hand-shake
smile — a terrible
concern in the expression
that the subject wont
reciprocate the same
escalator tension from
empty gesture to empty
gesture — these gestures
are the ritual of Late
High Civilization — the
American workingmen
have adopted a surl
in superficial opposition —
but the Executive

secretly & queerly desires
the Worker’s “tough look”
& the Worker (excuse me,
the Man of Production
in New Overalls) secretly
practises Executive Smoothness
before his mirror.
Ad infinitum —
First signs of the
Machine really destroying
itself & People is the
guided drone plane with
Atom Bomb warhead
— “DRONE” is the
horror name, deeply
named by mysterious
High Priests in the Forums
of the Pentagon Glare.
. . (I worked on the Pentagon)

The gray drab Indian
village near Actopan, no
Coca Cola, no Orange Crush,
just dysentery-ridden
water, & lizards on the
old walls — Jesus has
made it hard on us.

But a maiden wears
a smile, & a little
hidden ribbon of meaning,
& at the brook the
waters ripple in the
shade of shepherd
trees — the flies are
insistent, but so is the
soul in its thoughts &
loves, O Man, Poor Man
— Thirsts developed in us by
the Machine are insatiable

As for “freedom” —
there’s no doubt of
freedom in Fellaheen

Cathy says: “Write it
right here now.”
“Look at her legs
move” (the bug) “she
wants to eat.”
J: Nobody eat the
bug.
C.: The bug eats the
shades up.
J.: I bounce (bowtz)
Pee-pit (paper)
We baint (paint)

That paused look of a
man pissing —

“Silly Faust — & the
mystery of history”

J: Arent you dired?
C: It’s a nightgown —

The Agrarian American
is the strongest American
because nearest to Fella-
heen condition

Santa Barbara

1. New notebook

2. Spoon

3. Toothbrush

4. Lunch

5. Dostoevsky

6. Matches for lamps

The Fellaheen women
let the men run things
— in the driveway of
the country store on
Sunday afternoon, they
wait in the car & smile
while the men goof with
beer cans — These are
Mexicans, Indians, of the
California countryside —
Western Civilization women
would say “Are you
coming John?”

American woman run
things, even kicks, —
have made life a drab &
sorrowful for their
Milquetoast Machine
husbands, the dumb fucks —
also the American women
have subordinated everything
to “my child” — my
so-called child — (the child
of God, lady) — & so
make the husbands attend
to the children only —
Fellaheen children are in
the background silent,
watchful, & awed —
American kids are loud,
nasty, forward, disagreeable
at 4, & bored at 16

The horrible bitches have
no regard for man
anyway, just their
itchy old twats & what’s
come out of it — It
would never occur to
American women &
American Old Woman
Society that a 80
year old man’s life
is more valuable than
an infant’s life because
it has acquired its
value — They think
in terms of “My Child”
with an almost-mystical
sense of the Future
as abstract as everything
else Faustian —

A jet plane is an
abstraction because it
serves absolutely no
purpose to body or
soul — just flies —
All their other abstractions
— Communism,
Freedom, etc. — are
abstractions within the
Abstract Structure of the Machine —
Machines can’t
run without a theoretical
basis.
The theoretical of
Nature is still & will
always be “unknown”
because it is not
theoretical, it is —

Ah now the croaking
birds of California Afternoon,
the tweeties too,
the neigh of a horse,
the breeze, the rustle
of a paper bag stuck
against a bush — God
will come again in all
his radiance & illuminate
our souls with understanding
& pity, & Jesus will
descend into our minds
with his Meek & Sorrowful
Look & pierce us with
the pang & arrow of
our condition on the
plain of life — & bless
us with a soft
shroud — I want
to sit in the

desert contemplating the
earth & the clouds &
the insects & suddenly
the poor Fellaheen
simplicity-souls there
with me — I want to
be among them in the
night, soft lights across
the sand road, distant
dogs of the Fellaheen Moon

— the maguey rows —
the holy marijuana to
enliven my Vision when
needed — the sweet
wine — to soften my
cark & belly when needed
— the tender cunt of
my Indian Love — my
Fellaheen Wife — &
holy sleep among the Patriarchs

All I want to do is
love —
God will come into
me like a golden
light & make areas
of washing gold above
my eyes, & penetrate
my sleep with His Balm
— Jesus, his Son, is in
my Heart constantly.
My brother Gerard
was like Jesus. My
father I loved like
God. My mother
is sweet & golden-
hearted & never meant
harm to bird, insect
or person in the depths
of her simple heart, —

My sister is dead to God
now, because she puts
marriage to a tyrannical
but simple-hearted
man before her knowledges
of God & the soul that
she learned once from
her father, brother (&
mother perhaps) & Church —
She & I knelt in
damp pews of poor Good
Friday —
I am working for the
railroad to keep my
stomach in food &
drink but I want to
throw myself on the
ground & die for God
if it wasnt so awful

TO DIE & leave the joys
of food & drink & cunt,
& grieving relatives.
To learn the life
of sainthood is harder
than 8 years of
Medical or Law School
— I will come to it
gradually, to celibacy
& some fasting (by celibacy
I mean of course simplicity
of living, for instance no
gum chewing & such
trivial habits that attach
to me still from the
Machine of Anti Christ)
— come gradually to growing
my own food, to Patriarchy
& Silence in the Earth
& Ecstasy of Alyosha

SKETCHES NO. 3

Cowboys of the Wild
American romantic West
& the Horsey Set are
hungup on horses’ asses —

Cows around an oil well pump
say — “Leave the oil in
our earth.” — Later ages
will wonder why Faustian
man extracted all kinds
of stuff from the earth,
dirt, mud, oil — Silly
pumps ass balling up &
down the ground for
nothing — oil for horror —

( — Dostoevsky’s moon — )

Aping nature is not art,
only a gospel will do —

Tea — backtracking thru
the universe —

Not only a derangement
of the senses but of
personal evaluations, moral
evaluations of yourself
— tea is suicidal —

I vant to be alone —
since that repudiation of
a human wish Americans
have become adjusted to
their machines —

Baby crying in gray morning
— moments meshing with
every note —

Pray to God for the
great reality (on
yr. knees in Italian
railyards near spectral
tenements)

The first thing that strikes
me about Dostoevsky in beginning
any of his books is
the nervous anguish that
seems to have preceded the
first page — the hero is
always the same, comes
to the first page out of
eternities of introspection,
anguish, gloom — just
as I do every day.
Hmm.

The morning of me
liberation — Oct. 4, 1952
— I go live alone in
a 3rd St. room, leaving
Neal’s — for the 1st
time since 1942 —
(in Hartford) — All
set to write On the
Road, the big one
with Michael Levesque
— the only one —
have renounced everyone,
& myself dedicate to
sorrow, work, silence,
solitude, deep joys of
the early mist —

Train 3-419 is waiting
outside Oakland yards
— it’s 7 30 AM —
fog — great clutter of
bedsprings & screens &
rusty fenders for walls
make a house of
ferruginous barrels loaded
with iron mucks — I
see whole interiors of
hotplates, grates of
old stoves, the arms
of antique washing machines,
tubes, buckets,
— two bos just
passed it, found an
interest in a piece on the
ground — Strange
bird flies overhead —
Saw 1000 ducks Milpitas —

Next to junk crib
is concrete blockhouse hut
with protruderant pole
with climbing ladder &
iron pipe — a smaller,
sloperoofed concrete house
with no meaning (hides
a dynamo?) — little
window — in chalk
“Nixon is broke” —
Armour & Co. loading
platform has yesterday’s
debris — a Filipino
fishes in blue barrel —
October & the railyards
again, & the great novel
in America —
The Cook is Grooking —
Jacky Robinson’s at
bat again —

OCT 4

Saturday morning in a Frisco
bar, October, it’s the
World Series as in 1947
when Michael LeVesque
was in Selma Calif.
& the old railroad clerk
spoke to him in the
long dust of an
afternoon of sorrowful
farewell, when Mike’d
turned for one last goodbye
at Teresa in the
long grape row —

I’m getting my kicks in
typical Jack Kerouac
way, refilling a tokay
25¢ shotglass from
my poorboy pocket bottle
in railroad-grime jacket

& writing & watching
W. S. while Negro &
Filipino cats sit in
bar watching game
without buying or
drinking anything at
all — Mike Levesque
is like that, the
Pilgrim of the Fellaheen
is a simple & joyful
fellow & no “innocent
boy” camper like Peter
Martin — but no
more words, now for
the scenes —
(She was born in Montreal
a simple-intentioned pure
heart, & remained so for
a lifetime thru histories, paranoias
& grief)

You’ve got to put a
superstructure of love
on yr. life or you’ll
just be a skeleton in
the grave of yr.
mortal days, shuddering
naked against the main
nerve of yr. being,
unclothed for the
Raiment Halls of
Will, Severity of Purpose,
— God is a superaddition
to the frame of Man,
like the flesh & eyes —
Therefore unravel the
drama of yr. soul before
yr. eyes, be strong &
thoughtful, be not naked scared

The personal legend of
Duluoz is for communication
on a later level —

When I walked in 20th Century Fox
office in 1949 I knew the
corruption of certain types &
the City; but now I see the
corruption of all America
& its broken head on an iron wheel

Ah what’s happening in
the world! —

I woke up — 2 flies
were fucking on my forehead

It’s hypocrisy makes
these hills grim —

The pue of the sad Malley —
listen to the sad Malley —
the phew of the sad Malley —
song of the sad Malley —
(Mallet locomotive)

You have an inordinary
nack to inult me
every nime
This is the end of
the handball game
TO CARL SOLOBONE

SKETCH . . . .

Watsonville, valley — the
sun is setting in a mysterious
orange flameball over the
flat green lettuce fields
interlined with brown dirt
rows & roads & rails — beyond
the milky haze of this
dusk is the sea, unseen, the
Pacific to the Land of the
Rising Sun — the grass is
like hay, full of ants
that go to sleep at sundown,
dry shrubs, dry cottonwoods,
weeds, tart spice ferns of
Spring are now fuel for
Autumn Seres, — little
weedflowers close their
blossoms as the dusk birdsongs
titter — a farm in the
dreaming vale below, white-
washed barn, flat reposant
chickencoops & toolsheds —
I hear the distant hiway
trucks — sitting on the
mat of earth on the westernmost
American hill facing
the unknown east all
pink now — Sweet dewy
breeze hints of sea —
The railroad cries the
roundroll — I sleep on
the ground under the
stars like an Indian,
baseball hat, brakeman’s
lantern & tucked in
Levis & workshoes &
jacket, arms folded to
the moon —

a cow mourns below —
adios — now the sun
is bloodred, sinks behind
the mighty mountain trees
— the distant sad hiway
of little soundless cars —
the Salad Bowl of the
World sinks to dark, all
you need is a plane to
spray mayonnaise & chopped
scallions — eat a whole
valley raw — the figs
trees are shitting on the
ground, Mexican Motorists
pick walnuts from the
ground, the bums have
left a Tokay empty
under the avocado tree —
ripe California

THE CRUMMY

Where once I’d quake
at the thought of a
jawbreaking caboose hitting
in the slack, Wham! —
now, this morning, in
my bemused equicenter
I look up & see the
caboose crazy disheveled
blurred, as if I was seeing
it momentarily photographed
thru a trick mirror, &
feel no shock or wonder
nor hear a sound nor
move from my seat —
just see it as it
rocks to the bang

Now that I understand
the railroad with my own
senses I see that Neal
was only jabbering about
the obvious again, & in his
unnecessarily involved &
confusing way — which has
to do with his sadism —
to confuse — unclear
& befrought with subtle
“lies” or “hiddens” —
“hidings” — concealings —
— from weird guilt —

The Bird of Chittenden

OBRA PRIVATA
When you were a kid,
Duluoz, & the perfumed
aunts visiting & the
promise of quarters &
ice cream & lipstick
kisses & long afternoons
of gossip in the kitchen
as the sun gets red —
The Immortality &
Eternalness of all
that & everything that
ever happened to you
still waits for
that Obra Privata
pen, sorrow & faith —
(some of it in French!)

MORE SKETCHES CALIFORNIA

Sexy young Wop mother
waiting train at Burlingame
in Gray West Void with
blond son, campy meets
her brunette sister in a
suit — a semi wino in
brown & white saddles &
beat pants passes them
smoking with that “Hey
Jack, I’m tired & shore
weary” expression — Big

sad baggage boy pushes
trunks on orange truck,
crepesoles, buttondown sweater,
short hair, his mother’s
making chocolate pudding
for him right now, his Pa’s
puttering in the garage —

Hundreds of cars parked
in concrete back of
Bridge & Dugan Carpet
Specialists — A big
yellow squash in the
weeds near the railroad
fence of a California
bungalow settlement
with same backs —
Pale green dobe oil
company buildings —
(ranch style) —
Bay Meadows, the
starting gate high
on the far turn above
the immense Bay
flats & wreckage
of cranes & poles —
blah — The Machine Plain —

The California Okie
businessman with bushy
eyebrows & red face
clumpin along adjusting
his belt butt in mouth
newspapers sticking out
of shroud coat, in
first rain of year —
in Hillsdale — thousands
of cars everywhere half
of them new (now’s
time to buy jalopy)
Brown-grass hills, green
redwoods, alpine lodge
houses of 30’s Calif. —
Gray murk on palms —
Western Awning Co.
palegreen stucco —

& Dentist in Spanish
style — Dullness of
Texaco station, “Marfak
Lubrication” “Motor Tune
Up” — attendant pissing
water on windshield —

— Rain on the
parched Calif. brown
grass hills — the sea
beyond — Ha! —
What will be debris
by Europe track? —
here is oil cans, beer
cans, paper (brown),
oiled tie-piles, boards,
cartons, lumberyards,
junkyards, cellophane —

The winter in Italy? —
April in Paris! —
January in Venice! —
Summer in England
& Scandinavia!
Fall in North Africa!
Winter in Baghdad!
— !! —

CONSUMER CREDIT &
the new E. A. Mattison
Budget Finance Plan
Inc. is just a loan
to someone to finance,
manufacture, distribute &
sell a product, such as
home freezers — But this is
going in debt in order
to pay it off with
savings. You borrow
money, buy or invest, &
then save to pay off your
debt: leaves U.S. with
record savings & record
debts at same time.
Consumer credit is one
arm of machine reaching
out to help other, but
under conditions of debt.

In other words, Debt
(Neal’s big hassle) is the
form, financially, the Machine
creates to enslave the
individual to It — for
instance, Sinatra owes taxes,
back taxes, & is “forbidden”
to go to Europe, also
Dick Haymes — The
collusion of Debt, the
“Tax,” & “Insurance”
are tying people closer

& closer to the great
Wheel Rack —
Don’t accept “Loan”
or “Arm” of Machine —
it is a deceptive enslavement
— simple souls mistrust
offers of loan for no
idle reason —

The traffic problem is
merely that cars by the
millions enslave us to
new city systems requiring
hours of driving to & from
needs, on “congested” arteries,
naturally — where once
you’d-a walked — These
are all conditions pointing
to the imminent cancerous
death of America, the
Final Cog in the Western
Civ. Machine — the
supreme end-result of
early Gothic Phallic forms
is the skyscraper & the
oil drill & powered
compressor & pistons of
great engines — the Machine
copulates, men aren’t
allowed to any more —

The flesh gets numb,
but the soul doesn’t.
N’s feeling for “Marylou” in
that pix — her sexual
pinched pretty face — he
doesnt realize about flesh
is numb — till she’d die,
I say — Candlelight in
a beat room

The rat of hunger
eats at your belly,
then dies &’s left
to bloat there —

WATSONVILLE GRAYMORN,
a barbershop near park
is doing big business at 9:45
AM — gray overcast, raw,
cool — The park grass
clip’t to the sward — a
thin grayhaired fastwalking
lady in low heels hustling
towards Main St. of 5&10’s
(Woolworths), “City Drug
Store,” Ladies Shoes,
Stoesser 335 Building,
with Physician X Ray
Doctor windows above, &
“Roberts” Just Nice Things
(Store) — In the barber
shop a Brierly-like barber
in neat glasses & white frock
lowers little boy from

littleboy chair — Name
of shop is “Virg’s” —
with an Anson Weeks
band ad in glittering window
& a few bottles of
hair lotion — Little boy
was with mother who
trots him pushing him
along across park in her
big ass gray slacks, bandana
& crepesoles —
little boy has wool cap
over new hair cut —
Trucks of supermarkets
& Oakland Towel Co.
& just pickups without
lettering grumble around
park — The palms
hang dull in bleak

green bug-specked Void
— California on a
gray day is like being
in a disagreeable room —
Here is lineup around
barbershop: “Sodas
Shakes Sundaes” in old
fashioned Watsonville
sidewalk roof corner but
not Western; solid &
Victorian, once respectably
whitewashed, with bas
relief drape regalcords

& a “Surgeon” goldpaint
flecking off a round
baywindow — “Athletic
Supplies” — Sharp’s Sporting
Goods next in same bldg.
— fancy fishingpoles

in rich interior basketball
gloom — then “Ben’s
Shoe Service” not cluttered
but prosperous & shiny like
he sold shoes — then
the old arched wood
doorway of old bldg. with
bas relief sprigs — & a
doctor plate — Then
Steve’s Cocktail Bar,
shuttered with French
blinds, black tile base
of wall, cocktail glass
drawn under “Steve’s”
— Then City Club
restaurant, same shuttered,
but open door, red “Beer”
neon — (bells ring now)
— (for Ten) —

Then barbershop; then
“Smoke House,” an
ordinary cigar newspaper
store — “Pajaro Valley
Hardware” sandwiches
in old Colonial Hotel
bottom of 2 story of
which is Sporting Goods
— Then rich creamy
concrete streamlined
bank on corner, with
official Main St. globetype
(5 globes) streetlamp
announcing bleak official
clock district officer
corner of bus stops
traffic & stainglass
doors

In Pavia, 18 miles south
of Milan, the ashes of
St. Augustine, the great
monastery Certosa di
Pavia, junction of the
Ticino & the Po, fortifications
of Old Ticinum,
thousand yr. old university,
manufacture of pipe
organs, makers of wine,
silk, oil, and cheese.
Must go to Pavia

Taranto for oysters

San Remo for swimming

Padua for pictures

Stone Age village near Terni

It not to pay is not
a sin to Jesus

ON THE ROAD
BY
Jack Iroquois

Billy Caughnawaga

The “angelic” light
behind Joan in that
“radiant angel Mary”
dream — if so, Edison
is God because it’s the
electric light gives her
her glow — Only in America
a woman is condoned for
putting the man out of the house

Half of mankind is
Snakelike

Ah Duluoz, — when you
left home to go to
sea in 1942 — that
was the beginning — then
you’d sing Old Black Magic
in the night, & love
yr. thoughts, & Margaret,
& yr. good little friends of
Lowell — Sammy GJ
Salvey Scotty Daston

— what have you
gotten since? Edie in
the Fall led to Joan
Adams Summer 43,
which led to Carr,

Burroughs, Ginsberg, Chase,
which led to Neal —
& Tea — What would
you have if you hadnt
written Town & City? —
NOTHING — At least you
met Holmes, especially
Ed, & Tommy (they’ll always
be yr. friends) —
& now you know that you
must depend on yr. self,
& love the few who love
you, & try a disinterested
love of even yr. enemies,
but must work like
Joyce now, “silence,
exile, & cunning” —
All on your own
terms, in yr own intelligence

— Never mind what
Burroughs, or Ginsberg, have
to say about anything
— start by exposing them
all in your parable about
America: -
THE MILLENIUM
OF THE MEEK FELLAHEEN
Then work on “Vanity
of Duluoz” with
original ms. & all
new Duluoz memories —
in Mexico or in Spain —
in Paris or in Pavia —
Fish out that old
“Liverpool Testament” —

concerning Duluoz —
For now — we’ll start
(& remember yr FrenchCanadian
soul) — Compren tu?
Bon — commence —
Oct 28 ’52

The old cowboys of
1930’s pulp westerns were
always in river bottoms
eavesdropping on the rustlers
at late afternoon — the
Pajaro River in dry
California, brush, sand,
cow turds, trees —
ashes of old campfires —
Nowadays the wino

there realizes the old cowboy
must have had that
canteen of tequila forever
upended, the way things
are — Peeking thru
the brush at the doings
of other wino-rustlers
jacking off or cooking
pork & beans makes you
realize once & for all
the world is real &
pulp & pocketbook B
Movie magazines are
unreal — the late sun
on the cattle tracks, the
flies, the sad western
blue —

The flame of the
woodfire grows more profound
& mellow on the first
November nights, in
the caboose —

Remember that picture of
Edw. G. Robinson, a Bowery
bum drunk, visiting a
Class Reunion — saw it
with Pa — it’s as though
I, of the Pajaro Riverbottoms,
should attend the Columbia
Lou Little Reunion of
$6 a head & $4 for
game tickets — in
poor Halloween! —
Oh Soul —

“The trouble with me is that
outside my mind it seems
the world hasn’t got no
ass,” speech to Alumni,
Dostoeyevskyan, embarrassing,
significant

MANTELES PARA LA MESA

The poor little Mexican
gal in Calexico, writing
on Oct 1 1952 to Manuel
Perez in Watsonville whose
clothes & belongings I found
intact on the Pajaro levee
dump, wants money to
buy a tablecloth — can
you picture an American
woman asking money for
such a humble, useful
purpose — “unos manteles
para la mesa.” “Honey,”
she says, “dime porque no
me has escrito” — “tiene
tan . . . pensamientos para ti.”
She loves him — I am
wearing all his clothes not
knowing whether he’s alive or

dead - or in the Army?
I found several of her
sad letters on that dump,
in October, — in the dry
dust, just before the rainy
Season, —

Me: a man made to
stand before God —

Who is the Montgomery
Clift Stanford kid
reading Shakespeare in
the 12:30 local on
Oct 31 AM 1952
— what ignu? what
sonnets of his own?
does he realize Kerouac
is writing the Millenium
next to him, in workclothes?

OCT 31 1952
Evil dies, but good
lives forever —
The evil in you will die,
& your flesh with it, but
the good in yr heart &
soul will live forever —
Evil can’t live, good
can’t die —
Your angrinesses, impatience,
hassels, even that & your
shit, all — will die, cannot,
wills not to live; but the
flashes of sweet light will
never die, the love, the
kindness of hope, the
true work, joy of belief —

As for reforming others,
let them reform themselves,
if they can’t they were
meant to die; they
are barely alive now if they
can’t reform themselves tomorrow;
better a cleaner
of cesspools than a reformer.
Let every man
make himself pure as
I have done — that’s
the “reform” —
Work on your own soul —
experiment to see if one
man can be saved, as
the whole lot en masse
can apparently not —
on yr own soul first,

then the angels of
your soul, yr mother, your
wife (a new, good wife),
your children. If a son
or a daughter is bad,
throw it in the sea —
Your few good friends.
Cultivate yourself like a
flower; pull out weeds
like Cassady, Ginsberg,
Burroughs; accept the
nourishment of White,
Holmes: — water yrself
carefully — & keep your
flesh fit so as not to
burden the soul with
temporal strains & remove
that much energy

for its prime consideration
& meditation —
God, & Good — Direct

contact between you &
God means no church,
no society, no reform,
& almost no relationships,
& almost no hope in
relationships — but
kindness of hope inherent
in that what is good,
shall live, & what is
bad, dies — Your
flesh will be a husk,
but yr. soul a star —
The greatest & only
final form of “good”
is human —

Because intellectual
& intellectually willed
good & so conceptual
good is only a word —
“Almost” no hope in
relationships, means,
no foolish hope, but
true hope —
Everyone to his own
true work — There
is no good in work
which does no good.
Railroads, factories,
solve & give nobody
nothing, serve the
flesh only, at great
time & sacrifice, are
evil —

The true work is on
belief; true belief
in immortal good;
the continual human
struggle against
linguistic religious
abstraction; recognition
of the soul beneath
everything, & humor, —
Lights in the foggy
night are not necessarily
bleak & friendless, but
just lights (in fact to
light yr. way), & fog
from the necessary sea —
Stupid, fatuous men
are not necessarily
all stupid & fatuous,

nor all on the horizon,
nor completely devoid of
good, or hope — The evil
in them will die, the
good will live — Bleak
& friendless universe is
only one of several
illusions, the greatest &
only immortal one of
which is good —
Enough, the words to
this “idea,” or belief,
are limited, the combinations
to describe it
almost exhausted already
— Manifestations
of this in humanity, therefore
in your writing work,
are endless however —

This is the return of
the Will

Just the sight of the “snow”
under the locomotive, brings back
sweet light of the boy soul in
Lowell, the human earnest desire
to revisit Lowell this New Year’s
& soak up the sad hints of
the past in a grateful soul,
from just . . . “snow” — So
immortal love also hides
in things — talisman details
for the temple soul —
but soul, soul, soul, the
“details” is the life of
this thing —
GO NAKED TO THE WHITE

(End of SK 3)

EN ROUTE MONTREAL BUS Mar 20 ’53

I keep thinking of the
acorn trees outside Lowell
on that gray day Mike
& I hiked to the quarry —
Kirouac will be like
that, gray, fated —

MONTREAL (in “taverne”)
Montreal is my
Paradise — &
they almost didnt
let me in —
Railroad restaurant Frisco
combined with Mexico
Fellaheen girls taverns
& Lowell — O
thanks Lord

N.Y.State
Crows are insane in
the mist — America
is thrilling on a gray
day, Quebec non —
America has histories
of wood & Robert

Frost fences —
McGillicuddy’ll
make his comeback —
The Canucks are
ignorant, vulgar,
cold hearted — I
dont like them —
No one else does —

Moreover Kirouac
has always been an
unpopular name
among Canucks, for
Breton reasons I
guess — something
hotheaded independent
& brilliant makes
yr paisan bristle
with suspicion —
Noel was a whole
chunk of suspicion
— I shoulda
spattered him in
the street

And that would
tear my clothes
break my watch no
thanks —

In America the
birch is grievous,
lost, rich, poetic
— the woods are
haunted — a meaning
was united in this
bleak — I know
the dead Dutchman
of Saybrook never
cared for the
name Kirouac —

but I have cared
for ye dutchmen —
It is my prerogative
to believe, in my
own way, in what
haunts my conscience
& fulfills my hope —
I know there’s nothing
down the line but
gray indifference, the
earth-covering excrescence
of mean men —
That I was born into

a beastly world with
all the traits in
myself — & God
will crown my head
with grave dung —
but I have sung
the pale rainy lakes
in this chokéd craw
of mine & will
sing again — &
mine enemies look
me in the eye
if they will, or
be still

The moon’s
dropping a
tired pious
drape

A Whitman song
of New England in
Winter! — the
coasts, the white
sprays of shipping off
N.B., the r.r. brakeman’s

eyes slitting in the
long New London dawn
— the covered bridges
of Vermont, tunnels
of love of old hay
rides in other harvest
moons — The shiney
snake in the bog,
the mad bongoeer
in the dark shore
of Nancy Point —
the blue windows of
mills, of Boston ware-
houses — Wink of Chinee
neon in Portland Maine

A big piece of myself is stuck
is choking me in my throat

My belief in the Holy Ghost
less and less — it’s fading
— It must not fade, but
return — Return, Holy Ghost

March 30 1953

PLANS FOR NEW WRITING
“Newspaper accounts”
of what happened, short
ones or long “novel” ones,
with moral theme . . . since
that is the final question,
do we live or die bleak.

— Fullscale explanations
in unpausing sometimes
hallucinated prose, of
these things, —
(No — continue with
Duluoz Legend)

Spring in Long Island

Not a blue sky clean
Spring but a mixed
new-haze day smelling
of faint Spring smokes
— a chill wind
makes washlines sway
— a gray horizon, a
radiant sun behind
clouds — in little
snake mottled trees
balls of Spring bole
hang like decorations,
wave —
Six million diesels
churring & vibrating
in the yards, waiting
for fueling — The
tenderness pale clouds
that in the exact
zenith mix with
the pale pure
blue — Among the
bushes the carpet of
caterpillar hair —
The basketball
players of the
open cement court
are wheeling &

whistling — a ball’s
suspended in air, a
Scandinavian sweatered
youth is stiffnecked
watching it, others
in attitudes of
twistback & turn,
“Ya-y-y-y” —
— gesturing, talking —
watchers have arms
on knees — a ball
is bounced —

A mother works
eagerly in this
orgone ozone

day pushing a
teeny child in the
park swing — She
wont throw him
down the airshaft
— she says “It’s
chilly here” —
Figures on the
plain of the park
in various throwings,
strollings, pushings
of carriages,
scufflings, the
graceful walk of

a beautiful young girl
who doesnt care —
How can an old
man like me
devour what she has,
it is a nameless
newness insouciance
& style as ephemeral
as gain, as heartbreaking
to see as loss
— as lost to
me as smoke
or the smell of
this day —

nothing there is
left for me, for us,
but loss — yet we
choke & gain after
races & rush &
nothing’s to come
of it but tick
tack time —
A little paper on
the cement is
just as glad
as I am, just
as won —

Young girls in Levis
with little asses,
little pliant waists
& ribs wrapt in
gray jacket coats, —
green skirts —
I see them walking
off with the huge
LIR R coal bunker
as their backdrop
— But yet I
aim to write books
believing in life How?

In the heat of my
blood it all comes
out & good enough
& like birth —
It still isnt
Spring, the wind
in my neck’s
not April’s,
March’s —
insistent, beastly,
knifing — Ah
cars! Ah airplane!

SKETCH
Behind big engine 3669
in the bright day of
San Luis Obispo the
mtns. of hope rise
up, treed, green, sweet
— a rippling palm
behind the pot steams —
the young fireman of
Calif. waiting to
make the hill up to
the bleakmouth panorama
plateau of
Margarita where
stars of night are holy —

I love Calif. more &
more — if everyone loved
it as I do, dear
abandoned Jack, they’d
all be here — This
rippling land was the
Pomo’s — There’s
a cool sea wind
this noon — With
F M Hill I’m going
now to swing the hill —
to learn — long after
Neal, & hopeless — a
strange estudiante
writer-brakeman

Only when that work
which oertops my
hopeless men-among
bones will save me
up & back to enthusiastic
inside
me personal need
breast —

The Pomo word for person is animal —
So they spoke to
spiders & hawks,
& thanked the
ground they slept on —

SK People in L I R R Station

Gray skies, man glances
at wrist watch, —
not people — big
bleak blackwater windows
of an upstairs Jamaica
loft with French blinds
rolled up matted at top
& bank building marble
or smooth concrete blocks
— does God care?
do I care?
Say What you Want or
Drop Dead

You’re the boss . . .

Move silently, serpent
Thru the crisscrossing swords
of afternoon
The shining grass
Move broadly, servant

0................................................0

Sign in Sunnybrae, Calif. : -

BAY PEST CONTROL
Our Business is Simply Killing

Man is to be a
Young animal not
an Old carbon copy

NEW!
Brand New!
Daydream Sketch
Neal & I are in Mex City —
buying tea off queers — we’re
in a hotel room — they
are very weird, young

dirty — The hotel is like
the Hunter, with 2 rooms,
2 bathrooms, $10 peso
a day & we’re in MC
only a week just for
weed & a few Organo
girls — Neal’s blasting
& rolling & bringing my
attention to the weirdness
of the boys “Dig them —
dig their lives, man — The
way they live — how they
hustle on that crazy Organo
street — look at their
clothes, their eyes — hee
hee, now dig him, see
they’re talking now, wondering
how much they oughta charge

us & the little one with
the curly hair & the
airforce wings on his
T shirt who’s just like
a little kid — he’s
hot for you, Jack — he
doesnt talk business, lets
old Mozano handle
that — ” & the
mothlike dense eternal
moment of a thousand
things — caught — I get
so hi I see the history
of nation, Indians, America —
“But Mozano’s not
interested in the money
either, he’s just anxious
for La Negra to enjoy
himself — he watches”
Add Achievements: -
Met Glenway Wescott
in the Kitchen

DEATH OF GERARD

Oil cups flaring in
the misty night, the sand,
the ditch in the street
with jagged concretes
of old making little dusty
ledges for little living
strange dusts that are now
blowing in the night —
the flicker of the
flares, the saw horses,
the sand piled —

somewhere on the mysterious
horizon of the suburban
nite like scenes in Mexico
City or Montreal &
equally Strange — equally
weird — equally & O
most hauntingly like
the little man with the
mustache, a strawhat,
a salesman saying he
is dying, the golden davenport
of his house at the
top of the street —
the wind from the river
cold & inhospitable,
dim lights in houses, creak
of pines, lost Lowell
in a winter night in

1922 & I am not
yet born but the oil cups
flare & smoke in the
night — little rocks on
the pile have eyes —
everything is alive, the
earth breathes, the
stars quiver & hugen
& drool & recede & dry
up & spark — no moon.
Black. Shuffling figure
of a man in a derby
hat handsapockets
going to the latticed
house, the kellostone
pine, the great soul
of my brother in
sadness hums over the
scene — Hear the
river hushing under a
load of ice — Smell
the Smoke of the dump
— the little man in
the strawhat is going home,
newspaper underarm, he’s
left the trolley at
Aiken & Lakeview, bot
a new Rudy Valentino
box of chocolates for his
wife for tomorrow night
Friday, I am
dying he said to
me in Eternity in
Montreal years later

& that afternoon Frank
Jeff & I took the 2
girls, sisters, to the
bleak roadhouse outside
Mex City & danced
to sad lassitudinal
Latin mambos & slow
tempos & tangos —
the rain came, outside
it was a pine, a gray
window behind brown
pink Mexican drapes
of decoration — The
hand drummers dreaming —
I saw the oil cup
flares of the construction

job at the middle of
Gregoire St. in Lowell
in a night before I was
born, the moths flying
millionfold around, the
dense happiness of
timeless reality and
angels — the incoming
soaring whirlwind
cloud of thoughts, eyes,
the whole shroud, the
Blakean wind &
the voice in the wind
saying “Ti Jean va
venir au monde, Il
va savoir le mystère,
il va savoir le mystère — ”
& at the foot of the
street the house where
the woman had an
altar in a room, whole
statue, candles, flowers,
this dame instead of
a TV had in & for her
sittingroom of settees
& kewpie cushions a
bloody sadness in
plaster, loss & vim
of kicking candle flames
hundreds darting to
the rescue in air
screaming pursuit of
lost atoms —

The mist of the night,
the river beyond, the dull
street lamps, the pit of
the universe not only like
the Mass. St of Mary
Carney in another room
of the Level Time but
(as dark, as fragrant)
like the night of
the dream of the crowd
playing leapfrog around
the racetrack with dice,
knives & interests
— in Denver, in
Shmenver, when silently
I a goof following

a cop who later turned
into a woman came
padding in my dusty
shoe of dreams, amazed
— the last gloom, the
last barn — horses? —
& in the rickety sad
immortal Now-house
the swarming vision parting
over the heads of
little children on the
bed & I’m singing
a saying — “Where’s
Neal?” — & that
little salesman sipped
his beer in Montreal,
put it down, adjusted
packages, said “Ben
j m en va chez nous”
“T’est t un vra
soulon — ”
“Ben weyon, parl
pas comme ca — On
dit pas ca — ”
“Aw — ” I was
sorry — “En anglais
en amerique — c’est
une joke — on dit — ”
And he said: “I’m
half dead anyway — I’m
goin to die soon” &
off he goes, 98 lbs.,
dark, blessed, off
into the spectral

Montreal night of
suburban streetdiggings
with oil cups, flares
illuminating sandpiles,
as the Angel bends
over, Gerard bends over,
leering sadly
in this night —

A great
unequivocal dog
Is all a wolf is

I am Mallarmé’s
grandchild

The locomotive comes swimming
thru the newsy city. In
a deep cut, houses on both
banks, full of living lights,
talk of families in eventful
kitchens. This is where I come
riding my Maine white horse.

A woman in a
Clipper berth foam-
rubber mattress being
served bkfast. in
bed over the jungles of
Ecuador —
she’s going down to Guayaquil
as an administrative
assistant to
some Aid deal — “to
help develop the economic
‘security’ etc. of
Indians — etc.” — plane
falls — her thots,
running, her whole life —
crash — she ends up

being treated kindly
in a dirty village by
sweet meek Indians
whom she fears — she
gets hysterical — her
husband comes to get
her & takes her back
to her bedroom in some
exclusive section outside
Chicago — she’s had
her taste of “Global
Democracy” “Anti-
Communism” & all that
highblown Time shit —
A movie idea —
She appears on TV
& you see her lie about
her “experience” —

Add to Sam Horn
the idea of modern
cowboys with Ford
Mercuries

Man, the terrible laugh
of those who think
themselves special
— élite — it
has a gory
hungry sound
lonely
dirty

Apr 28 ’53
San Luis Obispo
Blue 2 PM Sky
Mtns smoky
Growl of motor of
bigtruck on 101
Who cares
Everything is alive
the blue glass domes
on tphone pole
The skittering birds
Rippling palm leaves
Waving pine branches
Valley of hope pale
green with dark bushes

A completely pastless
man smoking a
cig in a dark
bedroom — fuck
literature! —
write like at 18! —
cracked insanity of
T & C years
esply 1948 —
enjoy — daydreams

Unbroken word sketches
of the subconscious pictures
of sections of the
memory life of an
imbecile genius resting

in the madhouse of his
mind — The word
flow must not be disturbed,
or picture forgotten for
words’ sakes, nor the
pictures stretched beyond
their bookmovie strength
except parenthetically.

Work from your own side of literature
& room fetish, not “publishing’s” —
It’s the Holy Memory
It’s the dinihowi of
Memory
It’s fit for dunes &
desert huts & railroad
hotels
Let them pick the story
out of the house of your
words, floor by floor, room
by room

Work on Railroad

DRUNK: Know I can handle it (OVERCONFIDENCE)

HIGH: Fear I cant handle it (UNDERCONFIDENCE)

SOBER: Know I can handle it with reservations (NORMAL CONFIDENCE)

Same with work on mind
& memory —
Automatic interest in
that you write what &
how you like, on spot
Present tense —
LIKE

The following Sketch

Late afternoon in San
Luis, the Juillard Cockroft
redbrick courthouse warehouse
building stands in the
profound 6 PM clarity
to the stwigger of all
the birdies — some of
the birds trill, some sing
like humans — a faroff
racing motor — the still
“suburban” trees — always
the rippling pine fronds,
the breeze — The green
pale grass mtn. with its
raw earth cut telephone
pole & scattered cows —

the green dazzle of
grayfence bushes — shadow
of a porch across the
leaves & whitened buds —
Moving shadows of bush
on white house — The
old Indian’s been
rubbing his antique
truck all day to get
the rust rid — now’s
inside working on
dashboard — That
sweet little cottage shack,
Southern style groundlevel porch,
purple flowers in a rock
front, little slopey roof,
broom, doormat, with a
TV in SJ fine —

PEOPLE

“What do you mean,
There are no people?
Isnt Hawk people?
Isnt Dove people?
And Rat
And Flint
And all the rest?”
— Jaime d Angulo

COYOTE VIEJO

My father in his dying
1945 year thought Danny
Kaye was funny — we’d
listen to the radio, go to
shows — how humble in
eternity can you get?
— We’d sit in the Ozone Pk
parlor on Fri nites listening
to the Pabst Blue Ribbon
Ads between Danny’s
jokes like O Really?
No O Reilly! —
& Hal Chase thot
Danny was funny too
& that too is a strange
humility in eternity
— that these gigantic
hearts shd. have latched

onto such a stale &
narrow clown —
& all for what?
— for waste of time —
I even used to
listen to Jas Melton,
dreaming of SERENADE
by James M Cain,
just as today I waste
time on boxscores, on
Philley’s last hit
or Greengrass’s
homer — or on
TV stupidities —
how mediocre everything’s
got since 10 years!

INTENSITY

Intensity must be all
Ripeness
Intensity is all
All night eager pale
face Chinatown talk
in eternity weary
mystery
Health is for clams
snails & shells
Intensity & sorrow
is for Geo Martins
of Time
For Zagg Big O’Zaggus

ALLEN G.

O Allen Dear Allen
Ah Allen Poor Me
Walked the streets of
Ee ter ni Tee
With me —
O Allen Sad Allen Ah
Mystery — Ah Me
Ghettos
East Sides
Denver Pigeons
Doldrums of Coasts
Suicides of Seas
& Hart Crane Sub
Sea Deities
And Corals & Shelves
Immemorial
Hallos

I have nothing to
say to ye
Except
Dont trod the wrong
tightrope
Weird Mind will wrassle
Thee
To a meet in the
Hole of Destiny
With an Angel White
as Heaven
Gold
Snow
Cobalt Pearl
And Fires of Rose
Then remember me
long dead.

WM BUTLER YEATS

Stormy mad
Irish Sea
Sex and bone
Cane pipe peat
Death stone
Constantinople
Dostoevsky of Machree
Patriarch of Mayo
Pard of Innisfree
Isle of Imagery
A.E.
James J.
Leopold Bloom
Curmudgeon Connaught
Patrick O Gogarty Bemulligan
Silt throat

LONG DEAD’S LONGEVITY

Long dead’s longevity
Coyote Viejo
Ugly un handsome old
puff chin eye crack
Bone fat face McGee
In older rains sat by
new fires
Plotting unwanted pre
doomed presupposing
Odes — long dead
Riverbottom bum
Raunchy
Scrounge
Brakeman bum
Wine cans sand sexless
Silence die tomb
Pyramid cave snake Satan

TOMBSTONE

I was a naive
overbelieving type

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Half wanting to live
Full having to work

Sketching is successful
but not fun — not
artistically absorbing,
like making jerky
or building a fire
or writing a
Cody Pomeray in
The Poolhalls
or sketching from the mad mind itself

The metaphysical mayor
broke down

That which has not
long to live, frets —
That which lives
forever
Is full of peace
And there is no man who’ll live forever
Here it is California,
little young girls going to
school in the fresh &
dewy sidewalks of sleepy
San Luis — birds are
noising up & down —
a mist sweetens the
mountains — the cool
sea beyond the hills
has been all night
& will be all day —
ever eating sand, creaming
rocks, washing worlds —
The rail is sticky, wet,
dewy — clean architectural
trains & perfect red &
black signals —

my life so lonely &
empty without someone
to love & lay, & without
a work to surpass
myself with, that I
have nothing nothing
to write about even
in the first clear joy
of morning — Today
May 5 1953 I’m
going to decide on my
next book — the
idleness is killing —
WILL to decide —

The pristine leader who
made & lost this house
has none of my sympathy.

In the desert there was
a sign that said
“SNAKE CHEF’S
DAUGHTER DOVE
XND
JOSEPH CHARLES BRETON
HERE RECOMMENCED
THE WORLD
FROM THE GREAT FIRE OF
JULY 1845
URP RAIN AGAIN”
though no one had seen
it except the father
of the later generation
Bretons, John.
“Urp what again?”
“Rain”
“What’s that mean.”
“Nobody knows Looks
like urp. It might
be something else.
It looks like Snake
Chef’s Daughter Dove.
It might be something
else.”
“When did you see
this sign? Why didnt
you bring it with you?”
“I saw it in 1895
with Uncle Bull Balloon
I didnt bring it I didnt

even touch it. That was
my father’s sign your
grandfather He was
given the name Silver
Fox by the Indians His
son his eldest son his
first was called Coyote
& is now somewhere in
the Mexican desert or
walking along a railroad
track in California
& known as Whitey to
the bums & Coyote
Viejo to the Mexicans
& has a flowing white
beard. That is your
uncle Samuel He is
I believe in the
Zacatecan Desert &

like a ghost.”
“How old were you in
1895?”
“How should I know?”
“How old are you now?”
“I ceased I dont
count any more I
ceased & deceased . . .
And that little hotbox
in yr car wasnt
even formed in yr
unborn brain cells
when I made my first
payment on this
farce — & you, but
just an idea buried in
dirt at the back of
my brain.”
“I remember Old
Jim when his eyes
were moist — ”

Sun Apr 26 SWING THE HILL

(The railroad is a steely
proposition)

Animals dont have pride
Men shouldnt — healthy
men have no peacock
pride
I’ve been imitating Gerard
in reverence since he
died — his death was
my one real tragedy
more than Pa — his
death my death — But
imitating & adoring him
I grew exclusive, special,
prideful, found Turf, later
“literature” to do in my room

— in fact life insulting me
because it no longer
included Gerard —
Get rid of pride
Get rid of sorrow
Mix with the People
Go among the People,
the Fellaheen not the
American Bourgeois Middle-
class World of neurosis
nor the Catholic French
Canadian European World
— the People —
Indians, Arabs, the
Fellaheen in country, village,
of City slums — an
essential World Dostoevsky
if you want to Gauguin on —
but mainly, fulfill yr.
needs, live, — sit staring
in the yard all day, if
the other men laugh at
you challenge them
& ask them if “you would
like it if I laugh at
you” — Screw, drink,
be lazy, roam, do
nothing . . . gather yr.
food — Get out of
America for good, it’s
a Culture holding you,
no Life — The People
of No Good & Evil —
of No Culture, no
Prophets — nothing but
essential politics & literature
as Tales of the People —

Gauguin practised a
neurotic civilization
impressionism among
primitive fellaheen
people — is his
art so good as they
say? — is it better
really than all-out
culture bourgeois dutch
come-&-honey Rembrandt?
— of course not — Impressionism
is & has always been
a breakup & compromise
in the art of picturing
nature & is now a
wild scatalogical paint
blur call’d Surrealism etc

Primitive art nevertheless
is closer to Surrealism
than “Naturalism”
(which is unnaturally technical)
— but primitive
art does not consider
Subconsciousness or
Primitivism — & is in
any case Decoration
for Utilitarian Purposes,
not so called “expression
for expression’s sake”
& the difference is
millionfold down deep —
Gauguin would have done
better decorating their pots
& boats — This humility
is the true artist’s —

& explains the vast
greatness of Bach writing
for the Sunday Service,
Raphael painting for
the church wall, —
the essential uselessness
of Goethe — Shakespeare
writing to fill the
theater seats — (a
shoddy purpose) —
Homer singing to his
listeners is the essential
fellaheen poet —
There are 3 basic
possibilities in fellaheen
Hunter, Priest, Warrior
The hunter has to be experienced,
the priest political, the warrior
mindless — I’ll have to
learn to be a hunter

The railroad is the hunt
in America, for me (&
Neal & Hinkle) — hunt
down the rail for bread —
I gotta learn many
essential things now

Hit my natural male
level after awhile —
It aint easy to get
away from the inworked
influence of Civilization
— which is an avoidance
of reality finding its
greatest symbol in
embalming fluid —
Sad that even the fella-
heen are stupid — want
radios & soap operas —
Thoreau made the 19th
century intellectual mistake
of reading the
Koran & the Bible instead
of following his
soul to ultimate . . . the
tales of creation among
the Indians & even
further the methods
of hunting & nomadry
— instead he pored over
the stale Goy Hatreds
of the Old Testament,
the aristocratic “middle-
class” Arabic cultisms
of Mohammed —
The People Need no
Religion, no Art, no War

A healthy man imitating
an invalid —
me imitating Gerard —
men imitating Christ
Cockless Christ —

Culture, & Civilization
its later millionfold
subdivision into
technicalities red tape
& by laws, is an
incredibly useless clutter
of substitutes for
sex & real life —
Anyone interested in
the million details &
sensations of a Culture
is interested in clutter &

is now (sic) longer in contact
with the Life Flow underneath
this junk & therefore
Neurotic &
Dead in Life —
Reich’s Orgone Box
doesnt compare to a screw
in the noonday sun — nor
Bogomolets’ serum
to sexual & therefore
spiritual (joie de vivre)
longevity —
Needs from the
earth bleeding — pulque,
cocaine, marijuana,
peotl, gangee, herbs,
woods, vegetables, acorns,
greens, & the rabbit

Remember that everything
is alive — the Spider,
the Rattlesnake, the Tree
Wish no harm &
none will come yr way
& tell it to the
world alive,
the Animal, the People

I shall become a
goatherd — goat
milk, goat butter, &
tortillas & beans
with goat cheese

And yet most of these observations
arise from the fact I
cant get a woman anyhow —
too “bashful,” too “scowling” —

Tho it would be hard
to surpass the profound
nostalgia of the smoke
of an American cigar,
you would have to surpass
it. — To find the
Fellaheen Reality
means to find a
primitive country life
with no morals —
Country life with
morals, as in North
Carolina, is the most
destructive life on
earth — City life with
morals offers a few
diversions more, nothing more.

Yet whenever I get the
most rigid & philosophising
& dualizing as now,
is when I most weakly
feel like reacting to
the allurements of
what I seek to cast
out —

I dont know when
this eternal dual
circle will end —
In 1949 it was
Homestead vs. Decadence
1951
Mexico City vs. Work in U.S.
1953
Fellaheen vs. America
Be decadent, work in U S &
Have a Fellaheen Homestead too

All is I want
Love when I want it
Rest when I want it
Food when I want it
Drink when I want it
Drugs when I want it
The rest is bullshit
I am now going out
to meditate in the
grass of San Luis Creek
& talk to hoboes &
get some sun & worry
where my soul is going
& what to do & why
as ever
& ever
shit

So that writing will finally
in me end up to be the
working out of the burden
of my education
for personal Surrealistic
self-therapeutic education-
burden time-fillers in
Agrarian & Fellaheen Peace

No radio TV education or
papers — a sombrero, a
mujer, goats, weed & guitars

I blame God for
making life so
boring —

Drink is good for
love — good for
music — let it
be good for
writing —

This drinking is my
alternative to suicide,
& all that’s left

And marijuana
the holy weed
It isnt anybody’s fault
that I am bored —
it’s the condition of
time — the burden
of putting up & filling
in with tick tack
time in dull dull day
— How humorous it
is that I am bored,
that it’s no one’s
fault, that time
is a drag — that I
would rather commit
suicide than go on
being bored —
Men are new creatures
not built for this old
earth — the lizard yes

The lizard lost all
his children long before
men began being bored
in this Eden of Harshness

Alcohol, weed, peotl —
bring em on — &
bring on bodies —
Why does the Indian
drink?
Because he never knew
how to make himself
drunk with weeds &
brews — only stoned

The carefully exposed
sipper’s bottle is
suddenly rapidly sinking

Every year be writing 3
books simultaneously
— a morning sober book
— an afternoon high book
(the greatest)
— a night drunk book

hee hee hee!
& girl
& friends
& universal tippling
forgiveness
WRITE IN SMALL PRINT WHEN YR. DRUNK
The charm of the original drunk —
Vermont — the mtns. of Manchester
& we all got drunk — Kids — tore
up trees — the earth got drunk with
us as I remember — weaving, swaying —

THERE WERE OUTCRIES***NASCENCES
OF LOVE***I FELL HEADFIRST
out of the car to greet the
ladies — GJ protected me
& goofed with me in the romantic
American starlit nite of
youth — G.J. — still great
is G.J. — huge-in-eternity GJ —

Goodbye, San Luis Obispo

July 1953
One of those downtown
Manhattan cobble corners
on a gray afternoon
given so much more gloom
to its already gloomy
dimness — the big
busy trucks of commerce
& even occasional horse
teams clattering & booming
by — The corner where
the old 1860 redbrick
now weatherbrick bldg
sags, with Mexican like
sagging black sad broken
sidewalk roof suspended
by bars attached to the
wallfront — it’s like

a vision of the old Buenos
Aires waterfront & beater
still & like the bleak
merceds of So America
but the heart of modern
sophisticated Rome-New
York — A rain of
plips & day-mosquitos
falls across the black
dank gloom of the
corner — profoundly hidden
within is an almost
unnamable man on
a crate bent & thought-
ful in the day dark
over his order book &
by mountains of
cabbage crates — The
gray sky above has a
hurting luminosity to the
eye & also rains with
tiny nameless annoying
flips & orgones —
life dusts of Time —
beyond is the vast
arcadium green Erie
pier, a piece of it,
with you sense the
scummy river beyond —
The West Side hiway,
gray, riveted, steel,
with automobiles crisscrossing
in the narrow scene
to destinations like
bright silver ribbons

North & South in the
city & no regard, no
time for the dark sad
little corner with its white
oneway arrow, blue St.
Sign (Washington & Murray)
leany lamppost, litter
of gutter, curb as if
pressed down by years
of trucks backing up —
The lone blue pigeon
trucking along, the
squad copcar stopping
momentarily to think —
a scene wherein in
some darkfog midnight
2 seamen stagger, or
an anonymous clerk

in rumpled July summer-
shirt hurries meek
with Daily News —
or by gray hot noon
of dogday August some
small merchant in
brown coat, whitehaired,
clutching a box underarm
slowly walks — on
late October afternoon
a rusted & forgotten spot
in the great joysplash
of Manhattan with
its glittering band
of rivers, ships exuding
booms, shrouds —
smoke, of railroads,
trucks, boom of time
Closer up you see the
actual pockmarked grime
of this sad Manhattan
scene, an old hydrant
with 2 black iron stanchions
beside it as if
obsolete ruins of old
water or horsetrough
equipments of 1870
when where you now see
Erie Pier’s green parthenonish
front was the jibbooms
of great sailing vessels,
the boom of wagon wheels
& barrels — Overwritten
doublepainted all-lost
writing friezing around
the crumbling warehouse

says BABE HYMAN & SONS
& also DAVE KLYDAN SPE
interwritten
On the 4th floor, corner
window, a black hall
where a pane of less
blackdusty glass is missing —
the 5th floor itself is
home of a savage
poet who lies on his
back all day staring
at cobwebs above,
fingering his beard only
to — poems on the
floor covered with dust,
black dust — his shoes
a half inch deep in
dust — not dead —
yes dead — a Bartleby
so beat that it

is inconceivable to see
how he can live much
more than 5 minutes —
The bldg. is for rent —
The sun comes out,
illuminating the cobbles
but the grim edifice stays
gray & wears the
aspect of the city’s
grave — There
is no poet up there, just
rats

& a few sacks
of nibbled-into onion

urg

LONG ISLAND WAREHOUSE
In the night it’s the
great sad orangeness
of lights shining on
orange backgrounds for
red letters, like a
sideshow poster
the colors but nothing

so flimsy or entertaining —
White creamy huge stucco
warehouse of Kew Gardens
movers, the back of the
bldg. has silent stairs
with no one on them
never at night if ever
at all, iron stairs that
lead to a green door
in the whiteness of the
stucco wall just by the
orange & red writing, huge
half seen half lit
picture of a truck,
Chelsea, moving
phone numbers —
territorial towers of
a inexistent Kingdom

that once lived but
had to be embalmed
to survive the ages
& but now in our
age finds itself
misplaced as a
moving company &
no one notices
the Algerian splendor
of those walls
ramparts creamyness
& disk Mayan
designs scrollpainted
by union brush saw
hacks on board
platforms hung up
& rolled by ropes

2.15 an hour but
not knowing the
Egyptian Kingdom
splendor of their
work now in the
misty Rich Hill
night, the
Proustian Goof of
that thing

Evening, aftersupper
evening in Richmond Hill —
the cool sweet sky is full
of fine little white puffs
separated angelically
in regular
— over the tree the
pink hint sensation white
is calm, the tree quivers
at the leaf — sweet
is the coolness, even the
filmy wire on my TV antenna,
the new transparent aerial
curve is cool, white, blue —
but in the sound & the
sensation the crickets
muscle whistle, others
repeat the idiot creek
creek from denser yards,
cats lap & lick,
bugs hover, night breathes
sweet soft vastness
into heaven —

the motionless green
grass is like iron, chlorophyll,
Chinese, densely
personalized, rugged, almost
pockmarked, rich, as
if chewed — hanging
pajamas & rugs on
lines move majestic
& slow in a cross
movement, now they
hustle a little up —
flowers blaze in their
own radium world —
in night they aureate
to no human eyes
unseen magical darts
of prismatic Violet
light, for mosquitos

to whir in front of —
Huge purple transparent
phosphorescent night
fall now pinks the
white page of life,
faces lost in hate
& personal pitbottom
dislikes, hasseled heavy
footed too-much-with
himself man fawdling
in yards of pride,
whining at the dogs
of time, overhead
groans the airplane
of his far reached
folly —

and so the crickets
creek, cree, cree —
eaves darken & get
inky gainst whitened
dusk — the pale
dawn dusk clouds
move not but silent
in a mass advance
somewhere slowly —
it was in evenings like
this I’d lie in my skin
& jeans in California
waiting for the Apocalypse
& for Armageddon,
ready, head on lamp,
feet in big shoes,
pants tight, wallet
hanky knife tight,

no money no home
no need but a can
of beans & the
responsibility of engines
on the sticky steel
rail — As now the
grape of that
California Wine spread
in the West, shooting
phosphor glory over
the Come of the
World — The
green weeds like
with glaze on them
tough skin as now did
communicate with
me a vegetative
friendliness

Mardou’s — the gray light
of Paradise Alley falls
down the draining gray stained
wall with old gray paint
churred windows, outside’s
the scream of a little
girl — The hum big buzz
city flowing in by thousandmoth
waves — The
silence of Mardou’s
clothes, the water bottle,
rumpled bed — face
American goofing in
sheets — little sweet
sad radio — Love
shoulders of Mardou
Little tree & bush buds on
the screen outside — some
are dead little dry ravelled
quiverers in a dry void —
some almost that way
but still organically
vine likely tangled by strings
of green life to the twig
bough of the bush & will
receive their comedownance
come October soon —
some still green & juicy
lifed, twirled lifelikely
around on a yellow
Lonestem to droop in
the August sorrow of
peace & gas fumes from
hiway — some twig

ends are so small almost
unseeable & bear nothing
but dead leaves who not
only sucked it dry but
had taken a chance &
pitched a mansion of
life there but father-
twig missed, castrated,
cancered out & done
did die so now it’s a
pale Indian sticklet
with rorfled dood
leaves bup to dooded
no-life & shake to
quiver of earth on a
general bush bearing
no relation to world
— insignificant, skinny
as sticks in graves —

the big healthy deep
green leaves have et
up all the juice of the
bush, they spring from
elastic stems straight
from the gnarly roothowa’d
bough bone of
the bush-proper &
shake to the wind with
heavy weight & thru
then see the pale
day light in veins
absorbed to suck
blushing phosphor greens
like chlorophyll
— the one recently
stillgreen deadleave
dangling on a broken stem —

East River

The old blackgarbed
watcher of cities sitting
on the Live Oak Jim
NewYork barge in the
dry cool afternoon —
watching tugs warp in
finished excursion boats, river
tankers, barges pass —
his interest in the river,
the names of Tug Captains
& Excursion Steamer deck-
hands, the arrival &
departure of great
ocean going orange masted
like the Waterman
Liberty today docked
at Jack Frost Sugars

across the river in L I City
— This old guy, with
whitefringe hair around
baldspot but wearing his
black soothat, sits on
the bit on the swaying barge,
smoking, — to him the
city & the world is such
a different thing as it is
just across the Drive in
Bellevue Hospital where
in density of world interest
now gloomy psychiatrists
consult with patients &
aint interested in the sun
on the river, the free
gulls floating in the
sleepy tide, the
gay littleboats,
but in problems of
marriage & emotional adjustment
& all such dark,
gloomy, indoor preoccupations
& with such contempt for
those like those on the
river who dont interiorate
with them in this Byzantine
Vault of Mind Horror —
the walls of Bellevue,
dirty rosebrick grim beneath
shining purities of clearday
heaven, the ink of
the windows, the soot
darkness of the bars in
the windows, the formidable
mass & camp
& hangup of the

great structure — & only
beyond, above the white
clean modernisms of a
new bldg. N.Y.U. Medical
Science bldg. there rises
the screwpoint phallus
Empire State Building with
his new TV French
tickler on the end,
clouds of lost hope,
sweet, impossible, pass
behind it high, there
the interests of millionaire
corporations high above
the tangled human streets
— old Live Oak Jim
aint interested in but just
the river & that

Lehigh Valley barge
with the 2 cuts of cars
being loaded, meeting of
railroad & seawater rail
to railpoint in the
actual workingman
afternoon of the real
world — And yet
above all, the mystery,
Live Oak Jim really is
an old ex Bellevue
mental patient, flipped
in ’33, knows it well,
has his back to it now
in studies of his river,
— now’s inside napping,
his brother is a lawyer
in the Empire State Bldg.

Black Tanker

Gloomy black tanker
being tugged in, the gray
superstructure as tho they
hadnt in 10 years yet
scraped the war paint
camouflage off, the
blue stack with white
“T” — the black
sinister hull, — “Michael
Tracy” — deck gang
chipping hatch covers
upstood — stewards
huddled at stern in
idiot white, watching
waters — “I’m
gonna git drunk
tonight!” In from
Persian Gulf

New York Panorama

The UN Building with
white marble side, little
laddrs of workers strung
up the side — Queensboro
Bridge with archaic
pinpoint boings & big
superstructure with
minute traffic & looking
Chinese in the
sod besoiled soot
stained cleanpale
lateafternoon sky —
the river tide swells
& is somber below
the sad slow parade
of truckforms & car
insects inching to the

Eternity — In Long
Island City antique brewery
red oldbuildings like
Jamestown in 1752,
steeples, wine red ware-
house pier, orange clean
stacks of ships —
1837 written on a huge
grim dirtybrick gallow-
house nameless iron
rack cluttered warehouse
— lost unknown blood
brick factories spewing
smoke — behind them
other smokes of further
dim cement rack
factories pale & vague
as dawn in the pale
worm of the sky —

rosy clouds above — like
off the coast of Manzanillo —

Subway Sensations

Smell of burnt nuts
in the power of the
car & the aromatic
almond dusts of the
tunnel — Growling
whine of the shurry
moveahead car as
it balls from one
station faster light-
flashing to another
till wasting the
brakes crash to
stop & the whine
amid knocks &

wheel bumps lowers, till
the stop, the doors,
the bump, the
restless churry churry
wurd wurd wurd of
the power as it waits
to resume — cars
swaying, vestibule swaying
— The switch
point ta tap too boom
like a song crossing
another track on
bumpy parts of
track — The Mexico
cafeteria tile of
station walls — the
start-up again, the

growing whur of the
power to fly another
black halfmile with
smashing crossings of
posts & dark reelby
of pipes, lights,
concrete curbs, darkness,
Egyptian mummy niches,
— till the station
again,
the “Quick
Relief Tums And
Indigestion” sign

MY MOTHER’S FRENCH CANADIAN SONGS

TI SAUVAGE NOIR
C’est un ti savage noir-e
Noir tous barbouillez wish-té
S’en vas’ t’ a la rivière
C’éta pour se baigner wish-té
Tou-ma-né-got-a-wilta
wilta
Tou-ma-né-gét-a-wilté
wilté
Manégé — wish-té

De la premiere-e plonge
Le savage a chanter wish-té
De la second-eplonge
Le savage c’ai baigner wish-té
Tou-ma-né-got-a-wilta
wilta
Tou-ma-né-gét-a-wilté
wilté

De la second-e plonge —
Le savage s’ai baigner wish-té
De la troixieme plonge
Le savage c’est noyer wish-té
Tou-ma-né-got-a-wilta
wilta
Tou-ma-né-gét-a-wilté
wilté

ÉLANCETTE (sung fast) (Caughnawaga Indian)
Élancette me tonté (Song)
Ma ka hi
Ma ka haw
Baisser
Ma ka hi cawsette
O bé go zo
Ma gou sette-a

BUTTER SONG

Encore un ti coup
Ça raidit toujours
Vire la manivelle
Mamoiselle
Mam-selle-a
Encore un ti coup
Ça raidit toujours
Vire la manivelle
Mamoiselle
Ç’est tous

New York tenement
window sill, they want to
hold nature close to their
lives, they have pathetic
little pots with dead
roots & stems — One
tiny earthen pot sits
in an asparagus can,
its produce is 2 stems
with dry dead leaves
fawdling houseward &
as tho falling in —
Another clay pot
has a completely just
died green that has
shot up & then
down to die on the outside
at the base of the pot
the stem completely bent
& despairing — Two nameless
blackpainted tin cans,
small ones, former frozen
orange juice cans, with
just dry white earth in
em — A larger black
can with nothing in it —
A tiny new-shining clay
pot with a little
fwit hollow stalk
like dead cornstalk
sticking out — Another
clay pot with a
sprig of last Autumn’s
dead leaves torn with
a stem from some
tree it would seem —
One final jar with a
kind of scallion looking
green growth the only
live thing in the sad
window the sill of
which is incredibly
chipped dry slivery
wood painted onetime
sick blue — the
window frame sick
green — The inside
wall bilious yellowish
with stains — the
outside wall of the

building at that point
out in the back alley
a kind of stucco cement
with gaps showing
underneath concretes
— the sill’s outer
extremity is a slab of
rock — Here in the
hot dogday last days
of August the windowsill
hangs in bleary reality
meaningless with cans
& dry roots beneath
an open unwashed windowpane,
clutters of
wrinkled huskleaf that
suddenly jiggle in a
breeze —

The person who has it
is off to work, his
handiwork window in
the great symphony of
NY throws one mite
little note into the
general disharmonious
irrationality of the
world & its world city,
as pathetic as a
job, useless as tightlipped
mute unhappiness
of people rising on rainy
Sunday afternoons to
their further tasks of
carrying the burden of

time to a conclusion they
cannot know & would
not want to know
if they knew — the
junk in the window
is like a young woman’s
disappointed eyes on
a rainy Sunday, in the
draining dank gray room
of tenement life, her
sad feet shiftless, the
hang of her thoughts,
the angel of gray
brooding reality, the
Guardian Angel over
her sorrow, over

her little humilities
as humble as clay pots,
modest as dead
stalks & fallen vines,
— as strange & somehow
pathetically sweet as
those little frozen O J
cans painted black
by concerned hands
in a moment of
serious press-lip’d goof
in this Open Void
World forever so
nostalgic with the voices
of men
singing

for nothing & all lies —
idealistic lies of love —

“Men are tricky-tricksy”
— D. H. Lawrence, a
facetious Englishman who
stumbled on a serious truth
about love.
“Yr. mainspring is broken,
Walt Whitman.” —
Whitman should have lived
so long to hear an
irrelevant English tubercular
snarl thus at him as at
a cocktail party in
Manchester

“The Mystery of the Open Road”
or
“The Road Opens”

Great quote from D H
Lawrence whom I just
castigated & underestimated

“Stay in the flesh. Stay in the
limbs and lips and in the belly.
Stay in the breast and womb.
Stay there, O Soul, where you
belong — ” D. H. Lawrence
in “Studies in Classic
American Literature”
... on Whitman ...
The thing that eludes —
the working walls of
America, the dry yards,
the nameless meeoos
and micks you hear in
the night as if cats
were being bitten —
The endless decision of
streets.
like when he waded thru
that New Mexico flood &
lay down soaking in a
raw old gondola, trying
to light fires, & the
water all around the
boxcars of the
drag

Bring Visions of Cody
to Cowley

Sunday Night TV

Ed Sullivan looking at
audience with big dumb
nod as they applause
young girl singer with
sexy female laff —
audience applauds as
Ed inveigles them
further, says “Tremendous
job” — long-
faced serious facing
Sunday night millions
as my mother in

kitchen bends tongue on
lips tying her garbage
bags carefully from
roll of strong brown
twine, she pauses momentarily
to see TV
set from the side with
an expression of
skeptical peering curiosity
— “T’s a
Nigger?” when a
baritone comes on, with
huge voice, she
comes up winding string,
says, “S got a
good voice huh?”
as outside in America
cars gleam dully in

the August heatwave
Sunday night of
humidity no breeze,
the trees hanging leaves
still as stone, airplanes
passing in the overhead
Long Island softness &
the Negro is singing
“Because,” little mustache
touching almost his nose
as he says — “to
me” — clasping hands
to finish, little hanky
in suitcoat —

MY CAT

Kittigindoo sits
on his haunches on the
cement drive in the
shade turned half
around listening — he
now with pricking
ears is looking up at
house windows, eyes
green & dissatisfied
— when I call him
he is in a
trance looking strait
ahead & his ears
prick & he moves
his little mouth —

Sometimes he hangs
his head & sulks with
muscle neck, then
yawns, then moves
slowly tail a-
poppin — He loves
to eat & lick his
chops & paws — He
moves with the majesty
of a gigantic tiger
only to sit again,
lick at his paw &
look up — I wonder
how he makes the
afternoon, the day,
the time of life

& its whole long
burden there with his
tail & paw lickings
& chest nibblings &
cheek-diggings-with-
foot & neck-workings
with lowered tense
body right paw
supporting him — how
he overcomes boredom
& the burden of time
even in his 8 year
lifespan (which is
so long).
His isolateness in
the world, the
ripple afternoons —
little shadows of
windows at his
soft white feet,
the dumb pricking
rueful realizations
he has crossing the
green span of his
eyes & the lowered
pause & male wonder
of the Fall, the
consternation of
lookup, the chew
on claws with gritting
greek teeth, the
long contemplative
lick on long upheld
back leg —

The green eyed
slit & stretch of
forepaws & back
up, y-a-w-w —
Mangy, he keeps workin
on that ear of death
— I noticed in
him seeds of mange
last winter on my
poetry desk (MAGGIE
CASSIDY) — Now he
regardant reclines
to continue the day
in the breeze &
sweetness, clear
time opes around

him, unperturbed he
flicks his sore ear &
mulls, rumes, moons,
mokes, mulges with
himself the long
dread afternoon that
old humans kill with
beer or cubab —
the honest innocent
clean all suffering
cat, no kicks or
drugs available his
supple sad body,
just lies there
waiting for the
end of his 9 years

or 5 years — waiting
without comment,
complaint or companion
— licking
his fur in the bleak,
with no expression —
listening, pricking,
watching, waiting,
cleaning himself for
the Day of the Lord
O Smart Not
Crazy!

Saturday Afternoon Window

Bugle bubble blower —
freckled kid bubbling —
Sad lill blue yellow
rubber wallet —
Bldg. blocks half inch
thick — “Junior Architects”
bldgs blocks —
Star Stamper,
lill girl stamping *’s
Lil pickaninny penny
dolls with safety pin,
cloth, lil red cherry lips
in black face — Lil
plastic bulldozers —
Tiny Tim bicycles —
Nickles Dimes Quarters
Amt. Dep. cash register
plastic black —
Nameless old halloween
fluff papers — baby
carriages big as yr thumb —
Lil boy in jeans &
stripe jersey whistles
Pop Goes Weasel

at this window — Plastic
tiny oldtime locomotive, —
— Bronx prrt’ers
saying Japan —
Plastic bags of
dull samesize marbles —
Sad goggles with garter
holders & canvas —
Play money $25,000 bills
— ray guns — rubber
guns — big

pearl handle champ
guns — rubber cigars —
rings with monkey
on face — Italian
tenor singin somewhere —
Rubber Knives — (black
handle silver blade)
Solar Commando Gun
with Darts —
Handcuffs of little
tin & boy
policemen with

captain badge &
whistle — Sad
plastic flesh pale
lil doll falling back
naked in a brown
paper box with
a tiny mouth
harmonica “Robin”
— Fishing hooks,
“You land the big
ones every time with
Ole’s Genuine

Fishing hooks fashioned
by experts of
Finest tempered
steel, specially imported”
— Plastic
lil Space Ship, &
imitation lead Space
men — Jump ropes
with red wood
grips —

Expensive Nin toy
dish set — cups
& saucers, spoons,
with sad lil yellow
designs braided on —
Tiny pushdown
tops priced in
black 19¢
& shows lil boy
kneeling in toy
colors in lost
void —

Volga Inn Music
Ez tu p a va
tez - tomata
- tomata —
Ami topy oll
mayay —
Ena oo ee
Peñooti ma
ya govin
Oora pey

(Meanwhile night in
its October form soft
as Indian silk
slink in the door
dark, glitters of
New York night be
saddening & showing
where leaves do
jiggle & bloss bluff
on boughs’ come Autumn
“dominant” doom
— King Size
first in Sales!
First in Quality!
First in Good Taste,
— there’s yr iron
bars of the park
shine shadowing on
the cobbles of
the oldworld tired
street — There’s
the halo lamp
making seen the
goldhair backnapes
of Jacky O Hara’s
bestlastfirst
doll — Minnie
Gallagher —

& that sensation
in the pricking gut,
of winter, rivers,
ships, aye ye
green city &
grand land onrolling
it —
Hail Hail the
Gang’s all Here,
in Polka, bruits
in the juke —
oonyateez tey
ayetez with
muddy boots’ been
done

3rd Ave Bar

4 PM the men
are all roaring like
the EL in clink
bonk glass brassfoot
barrail ’where ya
goin’ excitement —
October’s in the
air, is the Indian
Summer sun of door
— 2 executive
salesmen who been
workin all day
long come in

young, welldressed,
justsuits, puffing
cigars, glad to
have the day done
& the drink comin
in, side by side
march in smiling
but there’s no
room at the roaring
(Shit!) crowded
bar so they stand
2 deep from it
waiting & smiling
& talking —

Men do love bars &
good bars shd. be
loved — It’s full
of businessmen,
workmen, Finn
MacCools of Time
— beoveralled
oldgray topers dirty
& beerswiggin glad
— nameless truck
busdrivers with
flashlites slung
from hips — old
beatfaced beerswallowers
sadly upraising

purple lips to happy
drinking ceilings —
Bartenders are fast,
courteous, interested in
their work as well
as clientele — Dublin
at 4 30 PM when
the work is done,
but this is great
NY, great 3rd
Avenue, free lunch,
smells of Moody
St exhaust river
lunch in road
of frime by-
smashing

the door, guitarplaying
long sideburned heroes
smell out there
on wood doorsteps
of afternoon drowse
— but it’s N.Y.,
towers rise beyond,
voices crash
mangle to talk
& chew the
gossip till Earwicker
drops his load —
Ah Jack Fitzgerald
Mighty
Murphy where are
you? — semi bald
blue shirt tattered
shovellers in broken
end dungarees
fisting glasses of
glisterglass foam
top brownafternoon
beer — The El
smashes by as
man in homburg
in vest but coatless
executive changes
from right to
left foot on ye
brass rail —

Colored man in
hat, dignified, young,
paper underarm,
says goodbye leaning
over men at bar
warm & paternal
— elevator operator
around the corner —
& wasnt this
where they say
Novak the real
estater who used
to stay up late
a-nights linefaced
to become right

& rich
in his little white
worm cellule of
the night typing
up reports & letting
wife & kids go mad
at home at ll
PM — ambitious,
worried, in a little
office of the Island
right on the street
undignified but open
to all business &
in infancy any
business can be
small as

ambition’s big —
pushing how many
daisies now? &
never made his million,
never had a drink
with So Long GeeGee
& I Love You Too
in this Late afternoon
beer room of
men excited
shifting stools &
footbottom rail
scuffle heel
soles —

Never called Old
Glasses over & offered
his rim red nose
a drink — never
laught & let the
fly his nose use
as a landing mark
— but ulcerated
in the middle of
the night to be
rich & get his
family the best
— so the best
American sod’s
his blanket now,
made in upper
mills of Hudson
Bay Moonface
Sassenach &
carted down by
housepainters in
white coveralls
(silent) to rim
the roam of his
once formed
flesh, & let
worms ram —

Rim!
So have another
beer, topers —
Bloody mugglers! Lovers!

Crazy Old
Homehouse of
the Sea
& Drowse Afternoon

At 28th St
& East River
— the great
seagoable hull

of iron is mossed,
in green at the forever
water line — The anchor’s
unrusted, gray, white
bars, balls — unused
— Ah the
wood sides & hall
windows & Navy
contests inside —
the dormitory row
of it! — the
madhouse barnacled
paint fleckchip’t
gull shadowed
bulk huge of it!
the pissing shovel
scupper — voices
in the helm, ghosts
of Billy Budd, old
EastSide dreams,
the blue Navy
flag — the
side doors & open
Dawiovts
Handel French
joywindows of
winter it!
— preliminary
worrying draft &
study of it!
Something sad, Whitmanian
& Navy-like —
gulls — that same
afternoon hotdrowse
of gulls & slapwater
dream I noticed
in 1951 getting sea
papers & 1942
too — the Melvillean
youth dreaming in
sea pants, at
his clerical dockside
work — with night
to come — the
Turkish bath madnight
& cunts

in parks — The
house where all
the sad eyed
Okie sailorboys
in T Shirts
madly sleep
— The long
dream eternity and
afternoon madhouse
solemnity of it!
— the long planks
& Colonial windows
on the actual water
of the living
(When the H bomb
finally hit NY
one afternoon the
first living act I
saw was a man
surreptitiously pissing
while lying on his
side)

Dream Sketch

Some doctor is talking
to us about the guy
who broke his leg
clean in half —
we’ve just seen
him hobbling around
with a curious limp,
some old guy not
Neal — “He’ll
walk alright in a
few months but
come 55 & 60 &
it’ll reappear &
be pronounced —
the nerve is

affected when you
snap yr leg clean
in half like that!”
— I think of
Neal & the hobble
he’ll have at 55

Paradise Alley

October in the
wash hung court —
wash pieces flip & kick
in the cool breeze,
on the radio’s the
excited World Series
voice & the name
Ally Reynolds
(secretly smiling Indian
padding back to
dugout) —
airplane drone above
in the buzzing world
afternoon of Lower
East Side — someone
whistling — hone buzz
hum of Vibratos Manhattoes
in Million
blowers humming in
the Void Wait Time
— kids battering, yelling
— a little red wagon
hung from a hook —
a moan, nameless
speetz, the rack of
French blinds being

pulled — October in the
Poolhall, the clack of
a sodapop box no
balls click till big
dense swarmnight —
all this so well &
good — Somewhere a
motor straining —
nylons waving — a
crazy inside-deep
high thin Porto Rican
monkey rapid
woman chat blattering
“Yera mera quien
te tse que seta . . .”
Too independent to go
be begging at
anybody’s ports
for more than a
month

Plucking at
Her ha! — harpstring

To whom rapture
means
rupture

Oct 13 1953

Applied for job at
Jersey Central — offered
ground switchman
job, stand in cold
winter lining
switches & sending
kicked or humped
cars rolling down
various tracks — bleak
— healthy —
$100 every half —
4, 5 days a
week — Plenty kicks
with Mardou, plenty
jazz, wood for

fireplace & dig the
big NY this winter —
Spectral Ole
Jersey Central is
like the SP
at 3rd & Townsend,
right on water where
rail meets river —
sea actually —
now I have coffee
in JCRR lunchroom
& remember 1951
Xmas the Harding
at Am Pres Lines
Pier — etc. —

A barge graveyard
outside J Central
yards — NY Skyline
of Wall St high &
serene in pristine
October afternoon —
October sits
golden on the
iron old wood &
white gulled
rivers — The
Statue of Liberty her
weatherbeaten green
beak close looming
over sunk barges,
pier, masts, in
spokeless blue —

ferns ghost swiftly
in the channel —
excursion lowboats —
This old barge teeters
at angle, abandoned
coverless stove, stovepipe
still in, still a lot
of dry dust coal,
table, colorlost
chair — the barge’s
bottom is sunken
mosquito hive &
tenement of beams
bird limed &
boards flowing in
tarn, the tenement
of gulls!
unspeakable hidden
home, they all
flap flocked when
they heard me
crank up the board
plank — Big
iron black bits
still solid in barge
deck — The broken
barge deckhouse is
like shacks under
Denver viaduct last
summer — instead of
weeds, tarns of
green bilge slime
& one old soaked
mattress of gray

— chick gug gug
Keree Keree of
some crane motor
nearby, insistent calls
of tugs — I saw
shrouds freighters
standing in the Bay
— harbor — The
S of L, her back,
her torch upheld
to a smoky uncaring
strife torn waterfront
striking Brooklyn —
Barnacled gulled
piers standing in
low water as the
old piles of

ancient Princeton
Blvd Lost Generation
roadhouses with river
porch dancefloors &
oldtime lamps with
tassels & beer of
yore — October’s
little falling white
puffs from giant
weedfields —
Jerseyward the
gloomy men in rubbage,
the smoke of
old switch pots,
industrial & sometree
horizons in the
October Gold —

I’ll live on the
West Waterfront,
— be Wolfe
— on a day like
this exactly 12 years
ago I grabbed
her golden cunt the
moment she jumpt
into the car in
Manchester Conn. —
I was 19, horny,
October Gold was
on the hill then
too — Oil
in a map trance
slowly passes,
pockmarkt shit

with it — a
ruined submerged
bedspring like the
dump in Lowell
a giant 20 foot
plank moves over
like a long dead
snake waiting
for the sea —
— warm sun,
peaceful distant
smokes maybe of
hospital boiler rooms
— nameless faroff
yowls of trains —
Swaying newbarge
orangepainted
— the great ships
fatbottomed crooked
stern strange at
the foot of Manhattan
bulk
walls — the mystery
of their world going
hulls slightly slanted
& tied up at the
doorsteps of Time
& the World City
— Good God
the great ocean
one way sparkling
wine white to dry
red Spain sunrise
to come —

& all the green
harvestland t’other
way, to other San
Joses — other yards —
blam! be-krplam!
the running slack
sk-c-l-to-clank
of a cut being
rammed or braked
& I saw the yard
brakeman riding head
high in mid air
over emptyreefer
lines — The
rusty playwheels
of the railroad all
waiting for me Ah

The long blood dozes

3 POEMS OCEANS KISS

Oceans Kiss in
Land that lips
Encompass with suck
Of love Immortal
Under the moon
Of America sick
And pale blond
Ashen tuberculosis
In Sanatoriums of
Colorado
Far in the Wild
Essential Indian

DAWN

Dawn’s gray birds
Herald hoppéd Angels
Broken-backed
From fucking all night
With San Remo
Queers Intense
And Eager to learn
The latest Literary
Avidity — Came
Chirping to Envision
Horror, Teach it to
The Millionaire in
The Rail road Hair

OOPS

Poets were Glad
When Success a Smile
Sent Wine-like
Smile Warming
Their way but when
Dross Failure Rain
& Doom of Exciting
Gray Day Coal Chutes
Enveloped Again
They thought they
Had to Go to Work
Instead — a
Successful American

Let us see which of
these leads writes best
in the softly applied lap
touch originated in 1912
by Swim Ward B. Thabo —
President of the Acme
Industrial Foundation
makers of Corsets for
Model T Fords in the
Nebraska Primavery —
For by applying the light
touch in the manner which
you see here prescribed
something of the Primavery
is retained & pre
served like Pen
shades

“Sketch” Sunday Afternoon NY

The great bulk of Wall
St you’d think’d make
the lower tip of Manhattantoes
sink is rising pink as
salmon on the edge of the
blue mouth harbor waters
as you see it from the sad
Jersey Central Ferry — about
4:30 PM, long sorrow rays
hide between the cold
uncaring-of-human walls
of Wall St but there’s a
heart beating in the rock
somewhere — in the
breasts of little girls coming
on the ferry in little

ribboned hats & lacy
drawers & Go to Communion
shoes their eyes avid wild
to see the big world & learn
& to understand how their
happiness is to be secured
from the Macrocosmic Stone
of Awful Real, how at
least they can adjust to
it just as the dying fish adjusts
itself to the swerve
& swerveback of the waves
— awright so we’re all
gonna die but now is the
time to sing & see, to be
humble, sacrificed, late,
crazy, talkative, foolish,
mailteinnottond,

crawdedommeeng,
all the cross megoney’s
& followsuits to be
mardabonelated or Bug,
— they’ll be saying you
lost yr touch & you’re only
a one day old Balzac
on Sun Oct 18 1953
balls

Time, rather, to be proud,
indispensable, early,
sane, silent, serious,
not mailteinnottond at all

Death of Gerard

The original late afternoon
of Fall when I was in
a wicker basket crib
& parked on dusty skinny
wheels at that long gray
concrete garage with edible
looking blockstones creme
puffed & as if puddinged
to cook & eat & unforgettable
in the One Reality,
the sun has warmth in
it (& the single twick
of a little November
bird hid in the twiggish
branch on the other
side of the cool
redpink lateday

air) — & I’m swaddled
to the eartips in pink
Fellaheen swaddling clothes
with rose cheeks & poor
morf mouth muxed to
see the day — a drone
of 1922 Fall airplanes
in that unrecoverable bleak
& the river’s old man
in the valley bed wailing
arms out elbowed to
swell the muff of
shore aside & on, carrying
junk fenders to
the cundrom’s drowned
immaculate cove
of oil sticks under
the Boott mill door

walls where eyes of
drowned boys mix with
ink rags & sweat of
dye vat devils with aged
mothers at home dependent
& enduring like yon
sadchild in basket the
wait of the late red
afternoon to see what
Paradise will bring — the
sun fairly warm, the
air cooling to supper —
the pines scenting toward
winter where black
sledders will swirl
the dizzy sticks

in traceried Netherlander
fields & I shall see
Gerard float down
pinkhappy to yipe in
the few-year’d
mystery of his days,
Nin behind him — the
heat of the faint red
sun on the garage wall,
on my basket, & I
lay in T like awe
eyes fixed on the incredible
immortality
of fadebrown almost
pink clouds salmoning
motionless in their
singed Nov. blue —

simultaneous with voices
from a passing car &
the croo croo ack sudden
yark yipe bark of
a big pup attendant
on some turmoil in his
sight & part of plain,
so I lie there (& far
off now, antique fire
crackers of last July
of back fart of pipes
of trucks or torpedoes
on rr track, echoing
far, like skaters near
Lakeview Ave. ) —
all Lowell waits,
the Kingdom, all

earth, for the babe’s
comprehension — for
someday I shall be
king, & lord over the
hollows & corridors
of my mind in
divine memory’s
sincere recall
Prince of my own Peace
& Darkness — cultivator
of old soils for
new reasons — here
comes my mother, the
basket quivers to
roll — the wheels do
sweetly crunch

familiar Autumnal
dry ground of little
leaves & dry sticks
of grass & flattened
containers & cellophane
crumples & coal pebbles
& shinyrocks & dusty
old graydirt scraggles
pebbly gritty like
the living ground I
would get to see 3000
miles & 30 years later
in the railroad earth
of California — home
we roll to supper —
I see a redbrick wall
before returning little

face to final pillows
so by the time I’m
undone out of the basket
& put to bed in the
house I’m asleep &
dont know & the
world goes on without
me, as it will
forever soon —
My sweet Father
with sincere eyes &
out stuck ears is
in a tight dark
suit hurrying beneath
the filament tracery
blacktrees in
pale blue time

to get to the last
client & hurry on
home — Nin’s on
the porch, red cheeked,
playing with splinters —
Gerard broods in the
dank parlor in brown
swarm holy late
day dimness, thinking,
“Gerard whom
the angels of paradise
shall save from the
iron cross & make
friends with God, on
his side, hero, saved,
despite all sins of
dizzy now” —

“Gerard qu on va
amenez aux anges
avec des lapins,
des moutons, des loups,
de tite filles, des
tite souris, des
morceau d’terre,
Ti Jean, Ti Nin,
Papa, Mama, les
anges de la souterre,
les anges cachez dans
cave, les giboux dans
l’cemetierre entour
du sidewalk, les
giboux dans la
lune Indian, toute

ensemble avec
les crapauds au
ciel et on
va toute chantez —
je sera mou pour
prier dans la
creme au pied
dun throne de Dieu,
ma tete pendu sur
un aile chaude
toujours pi apres
Mama viendra me
cherchez joindre
tous — ”

TRANSLATION NEXT PAGE

“Gerard whom we shall
bring to the angels
with rabbits,
lambs, wolves,
little girls,
little mice,
pieces of earth,
Ti Jean, Ti Nin,
Papa, Mama, the
subterranean angels,
the angels hidden in
the cellar, the gibberers in
the cemetery beneath
the sidewalk, the
gibberers in the
moon, all

together with
the frogs to
heaven and we
shall all sing —
I’ll be soft for
praying in the
cream at the foot
of the throne of God,
my head leaning on
a warm wing
forever and then
Mama’ll come
find me joining
all — ”

SUNDAY IN THE YARDS

Along the rusty track in
throbbing pink twilight that
casts a faint veil glow on
the iron blackbound soot &
coal, 2 tank cars & 4 coal
hoppers tied in one unmoving
drag, waiting mute under
the soft November moon of
New York for voyages that will
take them to nostalgic plains
of snow in the great land
west — those same rust
bottomed wheels will roll
& clack over switchpoint
ticks of other rails, drive
hard rust mass to new
Idalias somewhere &
where you’ll see the rose
jawed freezing brakeman
standing by a North Dakota
spur in a blizzard with
his gloved hand momentarily
at rest on the old hopper
handrail, spitting, cursing
“When the hell they coming
back anyways! I got
to put a meal of pork
chops inside my belly before
this local Godforsaken takes
us further away from the
last restaurant — ” — he
wants to eat, be warm,
drink coffee — but

stands in great weary
America which I see now
haunted redpink in the
west & a parade of shadowy
boys handsapockets walking
along the boxcar tops
in the vast delicate dusk
traceried by trees of the
living looking like little
jigglets & little Coolie
Chinamen howling for
the Formosa, their feet
topping down the singsong
walkways along which I
used to run puttin pops
up & down — As
if this was what a

man would want to write
who has nothing left to do
in his life but keep his
joy in secret scribbled note-
books — no, I’ll have
to try again, start all over,
again — Enthusiasm
is a design that has to
be re-woven in this
bare barking heart, I
hate my life now not
love it, damn
Leaves dont respond,
sticks lie broken,
dead leaves gather dust,
the West reddens
& narrows cold
the moon mawks to
purse her still lips —
lavender over the lights
of supper home, — wind
sweet memoried of
California, I die, I die
when I am not enthused
& full of meek ragged
joy, please dear God again!
The prayer of my
mother that I need
a father, answered!

“Enthusiasm is a design
that has to be re-woven
in this bare branch heart”
says the Goddam
motherforsaken fop

who calls himself Kerouac
& cant even slurk up & slack
slop out them old jaw crack
& spit, flurp, I’m gonna be a
writer if I have to be a
goadamn bom bum mopping
up the shithouses — of —
Ah — go on with it, Jean,
Jack Kerouac, & no more
foppery, jess plain western
talk is what I say &
let me see them boxcars
in the moon of real N
Mexico — fags hanking
back their asses in Sunday
afternoon ballets, to
show they aint just
cocksuckers but know all
about art & studied —
(advertise themselves as
coming from Europe, to
impress old Queens of Ozone
Park Ladies, & have Bach
& Shakespeare to Back
their shaky spears up)
The old Chinaman of Richmond
Hill who’s been in his
little brown store for God
knows how long before we
got here & for 4 years since
& never have I seen him
unalone, with a friend,
looking sometimes out the
window with those crazy
red sploshes of paint
making a rail-off-effect
3 feet from bottom, he
has his face over there
& is contentedly puffing his
pipe not with opium somnolence
but like an
ordinary Bourgeois

tradesman at the end of day
& he’s digging that dismal
little 95th St with its
fewtrees & the redbrick
side of the bar & the few
dull lamp homes where in
the evening old walkers of
dogs mop up the last TV
news bdcast with a cup
of tea — The bare bulb
that hangs from his ceiling
is so bright it lights
to the other side of 55th
St on a dark night —
you see the red paneglass
wainscot, the washed
strokes of red Spush
— then the little

alarm clock on the back
shelf — bundles of
finished shirts in shelves —

I’m bored

— the gray brown
lace in the windows of TV
parlors & he sees the shadows
therein of a race of
nabors he does not speak
with — at night you
sense his presence anyway
in the brown backroom,
a solitary white China
teapot on a shelf —
The sadness & brown
loss of his sonless
daughterless &

exile from Fellaheen
days indicated by the
little narrow mirror to
the right which has a
Joshua Reynolds Blue Boy
in its upper half panel,
now faded into a greener
blue of mouldy time,
& the mirror surface
itself impossibly smokied
by ghosts of time — the
poor sad calendar
finally, with month
flap under a great
golden breasted woman
with gold velvet
low cut gown — I
see the piles of white
laundry bags on floor,
the sad slant boards,
the counter — & the
huge guillotine like shadow
thrown by the parcel wrapper
& string-feeder gadget
5 feet (much higher than
Won Ming) high, casting
on the wall from the
Frisco forlorn bulb a
monstrous China shadow
& prophecy of more
patience, more fires —
somewhere brown opium
lurks — & nightcapped
death

But he goes on year after
year, alone, never nods
when you nod, looking out
on the street, interior
with his own Asia of
thots — His little
eyes in the wrinkled worry
of his pone Yonkers
Mongoil bone, broz
— his thots in the back
secret does-he-live-
there room & how he
whops his lil brown
pecker, all for
future spec —

ALLEY GASTANK JAMAICA

There’s a place in
Jamaica where I walked
for several months while
I was there in my last
months, north to the gas
tank, — a side alley there
ran between brokendown
fences, puddingsoft &
dark with mud holes, pits,
wrecks along the way,
the dank ramp under the
LIRR track up, parked
trucks with wood rails,
darkness of hidden thieves
like the backalleys of
Thieves Market Mexico
but no lettuce &
jungle rainslime on the ground,
just dry American Long Island
& the threat of
150th St Negroes maybe
hiding gone mad with the
tiger bottle or Italian
junk stealers hiding with
stolen cases of grapes —
The giant tank to the
wow bloody upnight black
left with as you pass the
cemetery on the other side of
it lights down a shroud
of spotlights so you see
sad hair grass, shroud of
light, hunk bulk hugetank,
gravestones of Hallowed Ghosts

— you see the little
row Colonial houses redone
& with new quarantine
signs in the street & the
shadows in a golden
windowshade of inkblack
shack across the smooth
newblock garage & dark
soft nights a tappin
along to my borey
death
dear
God
please make
me a
writer
again

DECEMBER 1953

The dead man’s lips are
pressed tasting death
as bitter as dry musk

- - -
Soft yards of old houses
are not for travellers
of the late afternoon sun
& long shadow on the ground,
and women of 35
with soft used thighs
& dust motes in the
old bed room
Time & Sea
Philosophy
This quality of late afternoon
in the blonde hair of mothers
in sad new parks is as
the taste of Springtime
in the violently parturiating
Mind —

so make no more leaky
vows

The poisonous mushroom
is malignant because
it is inside itself, the
sac, & does not derive
from the earth, but
fungitates in itself,
like a corrupt &
unhappy man; the
edible mushroom stems
directly from the earth,
is in contact with it,
like a happy open
man free of cupped-in
malignancies.
In all writing, creative
or reflective, there’s got
to be only one way
— that is, the immediate,
the free flowing, unplanned
way. For all is pure;
the word is pure; the mind
is pure; the world is pure.
In the beginning & amen.
Because the word is
sacred it cannot be
changed.
The same as in
Doctor Sax as in the
reflection on the water.
The water does not
hesitate; the mind can
know no mud, but
what is clear in

heretofore unknown words
& word sounds ored up
from the Conscious of
the Race. But when
the words are clear, &
everything is clear, then
the other minds see
clear to think it
clear; but when the
clear words are un
clear to the other
minds, they are clear
in themselves, as is
the reflection on the
water.
Amen.

The words are clear as
in the reflection of
the world on the water.
Therefore write the
Word at once, everywhere,
from now till your
hand is paralyzed,
for there will be your
work for God, since
you can not work
for God in other ways,
and would not, & dont
know how, or bend that
way, from habit, & from
talent in the use &
signification & arrangement
of the Word.

The elephant receives
the arrows of illnatured
war; you
receive the arrows of
your genius, & work
your hand in the
land beneath the
skies till it cramps
& pains thee, for
that is yr dutiful
destiny.
The last love allowed
you & the least forgivable
of yr final
passions, Vain.
Cast out the
devils, & be pure,

— add no lines to the
finished line. Draw
no horizons beyond &
underneath the real
horizon. Blat in yr
brain the bleet sheep
bone — falsify not
the cluckings, the
cluck-tures, in yr.
drooly brain, brain
child & Babe of
Sweat & Folly. This
your final body, final
shame, last vanity,
greatest indulgence,
greatest farmiture,
& boon to Man,
kind literature.

SELF
by
FOOL

be the name of yr
lifework
And forget thyself
to tell the word of
the world

“Watch yr. thoughts!”

False humbleness, false
self-depreciation, leads
to useless explanation.

At the end of a
meaning is a tangent
of brain noises,
avoid them &
finish where you
finish
The brain noises belong
only in the paragraph
of brain noises

Canuck, dont pile
up reasons for yr
activities

IN VAIN

The stars in the sky
In vain
The tragedy of Hamlet
In vain
The key in the lock
In vain
The sleeping mother
In vain
The lamp in the corner
In vain
The lamp in the corner unlit
In vain
Abraham Lincoln
In vain
The Aztec empire
In vain
The writing hand: in vain
(The shoetrees in the shoes
In vain
The windowshade string upon
the hand bible
In vain —
The glitter of the greenglass
ashtray
In vain
The bear in the woods
In vain
The Life of Buddha
In vain)

FIRST OF THE NEW SKETCHES

2 ineffectual old men
standing in the wilderness
they created but not by
their own hand, their innocence
& stupidity rather, &
all the Devil had to do
was the rest — Both in
hats, topcoats, infinitesimal
differences of brown hat
vs. gray hat (felt, the
mold of custom), pale
blue vs. dark blue coat,
both hands apockets in
the same lost way — pants
of 2 shades shading same
size & color shanks
(white stick variety,

as befits old men sedentary
& corrupt with
property, fear of death
& arrogant sons) — The
wilderness of their making
is the children’s park
with gigantic knee-abrasing
concrete, concrete benches,
brick double shithouse
for boys’ & girls’ different
shameful peepees, &
over the sooty brown football
field Atlantic Ave
with its blank vehicular
passers & the huge LIRR
carshop yards with
a dozen Diesels
throbbing & exhaling bad
gas in the gray chill
December afternoon,
all around the bleak
deserted rooftops of suburban
homes, bare trees with
boles & half dead because
hemmed at base by
concrete groundworks —
the old men earnestly
discuss some ineffectual
absurdity, pointing, taking
turns, both have glasses
because they were taught
to be myopic — good
old fellows nevertheless
as harmless as children

(children throw rocks at
beggars)
only more culpable & a
shade less intelligent — discussing
eagerfaced in their
concrete horror & scraggle
of iron machines & air-
stinks some unimportant
sub problem among
the problems of the
Problem of the West
— neckties, collars,
stamping their bloodless
feet now & ready to
go back in the hot
parlor to paper &
TV

— glancing at wrist
watches, waiting for
gut fattening shame-
obesity-making supper
— slaves of the bleak
without hope
without actual earnestness
but momentary profitable
appearance of so —
contemptuous of the
older fool is the old
fool — Their double
chinned cigaret smoking
women call the children
to home thru the
prison of iron fences
— The older man holds
to his point, he’ll soon
be mush to a new
monument in Long Island
City Cemetery — his
hat is battereder than
the younger oldster’s,
his mouth more twisted
pathetically — too late
now he knows he’s
got his last body —
“Paragon” is written
on the oil truck delivering
fuel to useless
furnaces — Clouds of
soot rise from an
old locomotive

in the yard, harking
to memories of old
America as the Diesel
gives 4 blasts — The
2 old men part, one
homeward, the other
toiletward, hobbling,
lost, tired, hopeless,
looking linefaced &
worried around the gray
park for nothing or
for a temporary unimportant
direction —
the sight of them reminds
me of the white light in
the shiny wax of the
corridor of the hosp. morgue

To drive out Angry Thoughts

Whatever anyone does,
anyone says, in the
past, now, everything, let
it bounce off the rock
of yr gladness (yr mirror)

Guys talking you down
about girls
Novelists publishing big
Towns & Cities
Writers saying nothing
about your new writings
Really let it bounce off
the rock of yr gladness,
because you are
innocent

(Free)
Let it bounce off the
rock of your gladness the
cold, rub your hands,
drink hot brews of coffee
tea or herb, rush to yr
notebook of MEMORY BABE
with every Memory Tic
CHURCH MUSIC —
Organ clamoring
with the rising chorus,
the holy voices of
oo-lips of littleboys
in white lace collars,
the overvault gloom
OO huge

SATURDAY dec. 12
ETERNITY BOYS

The tall sexual Negro
boy on the junkyard
street near the Gas
Tank Jamaica, about 7
or 8 yrs old, he was
running his palm along
his fly in some Sexual
story to the other little
boy Negro who had his
arm around him as they
came up the street in
the gray rain of Saturday
afternoon — smoke
emanating from junk fires,
smell of burnt rubber, piles
of tires, junk shops
with old white stoves
on the blackmud sidewalk,
rusty clinkered grates,
black mudholes, the pudding
soft rained-on tar. the
boards with rot in em &
old nails, piles of plaster
& lath, dirty neons of
late afternoon bars beyond
the wet sag of the
woodfence — the thrill
& mist & hugeness of
it & all on Saturday,
the 2 boys have been
arm in arm buddying
all day in this wilderness
of their souls & now
the tall one to the

littler kid his personality
so huge, hobloo-gooboo
African, vast, is demonstrating
that boy-sex &
they are grave discussing it
— as I come along I
see but pretend not to
& they peek to see if
old Walt Whitman see
but old Walt Whitman’s
in a ragged secret coat,
holding down all his lids
& not Whitmaned —
inconspicuous — I thought
“How infinitely Huge
is the tall one’s personality
& the Epic of their

Graymist Saturday today
as Jamaica Ave. swarms
with Xmas shoppers, the
sad Americans with childrens
& families spending all their
money, the phoney Xmas
Santas & cups & tinsel
storewindows — These 2
black angels of Raggedy
Saturday Real demonstrating
in their freedom
boyhood how great arts
like bop are born,
arm-in-arm & interested
in nothing but themselves,
lovers and pure as they’ll
never be again —
in the backlot too
they play with their
cocks & show the shiver
& itchpain to the rain
& rub the rotwood &
try to come, the shuddering
out-to-the-world push of
loins, & wonder — but
in the face the inescapable
& eternal Personality
(the tall one a cloth
cap, the littler a
wooldown) vastness
of nose, cheek, informative
push tout be
dra man talisman
eyes of the

King of all the gangs
& possible Prophets of
the world, Littler is so
amazed & what he could
tell you this minute about
Tall would fill 17 Visions
of Codys 8500000
pages of tight prose
if he could only talk
& tell it, in the shack
what he done yesterday,
the madness of his
secret humor, fact,
let Littler talk”: -
“Why he in the
bed mattress is the

long black funny boy
Sam I seen him
tho a rock clear
thu the smoke &
had sixteen harmonicas
in his eyes & in his
eyes I seen Sixteen
signs & he says ‘Boy,
dear Lord, I’m seen
the ghost agin last
night & Paw come
home & Howdie Doodie
Television Show &
Silvercup Bread & My
Sister bought it &
smile” — however

one can do it, it is
the Enormousness of
the Universe that makes
the Microcosm its tiniest
unit even Enormous-er,
— so 2 little Negro
boys arm in arm on
Saturday rainy afternoon
contain in themselves
the history of
mankind if they could
but talk & tell it
all about themselves
& what they done &
if an observer could
follow them around

& see & judge the
vastness of every tiny
unit — Who knows
the vast religiousness
of that cloth cap
when it shines radiant
in the mind of the
littler boy, or when
grown up & ’s forgot
Sam & gone 3,000
miles to nothing the sudden
memory of Great Sam
(MY BOYHOOD PAL)
will be as remembering
the Angel of Heaven &
All Hope,
since dying

GIRL IN LUNCHCART

Girl in front of me
with green sweater red
lips gentle thin cold
fingers at her hair &
she’s explaining (at her
high stiff hair like hairdos
of Africa) explaining to
girlfriend whose smile I
see reflected in shiny
mirror back of Jamaica
Ave. Lunchcart Cash
Register — 5 P M of
an October afternoon, the
young counterman unshaved
goodlooking hangs around
swaying & half smiling
pretending to work with
checks at that booth —
Tired puff eyed Greek
oldworker who spends
Sat nites in Turkish
baths of NY

voyeuring Americans &
heroboy queers of
Lower 2nd Avenue comes in
for big exciting afterwork
meal of Chicken Croquettes
with Sauce & will be
here T’Giving day for big
Turkey with works —
sad to live, quick to
eat, early to work,
slow to sleep, long to
die — Now so the
girl uncaring of old men
& pain has her fore finger
against her temple
while listening to other girl
speak & therefore in
nodding seriousness has
ravelled all her eyebone
skin up in a mask
of ark ugly furrow
destiny having no relation
to the hazel glitter,
the nutty mystery of
her sweet eyes & suckkiss
lips & long drawndown
bosh flop face discontorted
by further arrangements
of leanface on palm —
in her delicate edible
ear a dull metal thing —
her lips fully lipsticked
& curved like Cupid &
stain the coffee cup —
her eye on her girlfriend
cold, watchful, secretive,
pretending to be curious,
like she’ll make the
parody-story of this
gossip tonight in
earwigging dreams in
her fragrant thigh
sheets! whee

LATE AUTUMN afternoon,
the birds are whistle-singing zeet
feor in the dry tinder twig trees,
they ‘fleet’ & in the general
traffic (“Spr-r-e e e t”)
rush on Atlantic Ave. & the double
go ahead Diesel BOT - BOT in
the LIRR yards they wait
between calls as if, in the
activity of their own afternoon,
they had intervals too, time too
& orders from the parchesi chess
board to air conditioner machines
of the Glum Window World
make their little fluttery wait
wake, leaves falling not even
with you could hear the tick
of their little fall on the concrete
ground beneath which Indians
lie ancestral bone by skull in

tomahawk New York —
the fishtail back end of
some new car parked beyond
the Eternity Porch (like the
one in San Jose where I was
so high at gray dawn I heard
between the vibrating yowls of
Neal’s baby the great rush
of wave sounds wave on wave
shuddering & Vibrating like one
vast electric or bio electric
or cosmic gravity “struay
ill” — — zoongg —
scared me & made me hear
the moment moth sound of
Time, good or bad old Time
I’m in, and’ll write
for — So now to
“INDIANS
IN THE
RAILROAD
EARTH”)

— late afternoon Autumn in
Long Island, the leaf slants
down in the wind & hits the
ground & bounces & goes ‘chuck’
— as dry as that — the others
already fallen lie heaped in
chlorophyll green grass between
driveway concretes — the
sky has a rose tint in its
gray demeanor — the leaves/rose brown yellow
transparent/& like drunken poets emptying/
uselessness in pages
Never did try to get
on a car via standing
on a journal box except
one time on a splintery
flatcar & even then
I was as helpless as
a baby, one slack
bang pop I’d have
been as helpless as
a bread bun rolling
off to get run over
& flattened in the
middle & be toast
by Fall — — —

SAN FRANCISCO SKETCH (1954 now)

America’s truck and car kick has
made it place twin radio antennas
on the last hill of hope overlooking
the Pacific to the Orient Sea.
Clouds of sorrow pass over and
into a nameless blue opening beyond
the storms of San Francisco. Lonely
men with open collars and gray
fedoras take long drear street
walks where oil trucks turn into
gray garage doorways at 2:30
Sunday afternoon. Wash hopelessly
flaps on the roofs of Skid Row
where the great Proletariat has
come to stake his claim, or
claim his stake, one.

Everything is taking place inside
dark windows that have the
quality of inky pools inside which
white fish are swimming motionlessly
across extended arm rests, now
and then peeking out to take a
quick look at the street, flapping
grayed muslin curtains back to
shield the furtive sorrow. Rain
spats across the scene in a sudden
shower from the tormented sky
all radiant with sun holes and
Frisco Gray and Black rain
clouds radiating from the sea
like a vast slow unfolding of
its rainy tragedy where driving
rains smash futilely on the
blank waving void.
Hopeless blue
boxes intended for plants or
for the outdoor coolness of
Spreckels’ Homo Milk and
8¢ cubes of Holiday Oleo-
margarine, stick out from
windowsills in and around what
the City Managers call the “blighted

area” that must be torn down
within 5, or even 3, years. Dispossession
and complete loneliness
haunt the empty sidewalks in
front of old stores for rent.
In a tenement a little Negro
girl in dumb thought at her
mother’s sofa alone in the
afternoon room reads “Hardened
vegetable oils (soybean & cottonseed),
skim milk, salt, monoglyceride,
lecithin; isopropyl citrate (0-01%)
to protect flavor, and vitamin
A and artificial color added.
2 oz. supplies 47% of adults
and 62% of child’s minimum
daily Vitamin A requirements,”
from the cube of oleo paper
and stares for 90 seconds in a
Buddhist-like trance at the
little ®(apparently meaning
‘registered’ trademark) at the
side of the brand name
Holiday, wondering if the
little ® is meant to be a
secret of the recipe not mentioned
in the long paragraph, or a
sign of some authority hidden
behind the butter in a suit and
briefcase withon it and
® on his Cadillac and he
drives around with bulging eyes
and a Texas Truman hat in
the streets of the City.

“I, poor French Canadian Ti Jean become
a big sophisticated hipster esthete in
the homosexual arts, I, mutterer to
myself in childhood French, I, Indian-
head, I, Mogloo, I the wild one,
the “wild boy,” I, Claudius Brutus
McGonigle Mckarroquack, hopper
of freights, Skid Row habituee,
railroad Buddhist, New England Modernist,
20th Century Storywriter, Crum, Krap,
dope, divorcee, hype, type; sitter in windows
of life; idiot far from home; no
wood in my stove, no potatoes in my
field, no field; hepcat, howler, wailer,
waiter in the line of time; lazy
washed-out, workless; yearner after
Europe, poet manquée; pas tough!

stool gatherer, food destroyer, war
evader, nightmare dreamer, angel
be-er, wisdom seer, fool, bird, cocacola
bottle — I, am in need of advice
from God and will not get it, not
likely, nor soon, nor ever — sad saha
world, we were born for nothing from
nothing — Respects to our sensitive
Keeners up & down the crime.”

O Melville! thy Soul
Sustains me
More than all the Buddhas
That have passed
With the water
Under the Brooklyn Bridge

NY

Dont let your New York be modified &
shrunken by local transitory dislikes (such
as Tony Bennett-Laurels-bleak N.Y.) (in
all this Applish Apple) — but the Liberté
steaming in in brightgold afternoon, of
the Daily News, 4 AM bars, Birdland,
Jackie Gleason, Italian restaurants,
5th Avenue, Lucien, Wolfe, Charley
Vackner the race results, West St. water-
front, Friday night fights in the TV saloon,
the Columbia Campus in May, the Remo, hep-
cats on corners bent, Pastrami at the Gaiety,
an ice cream soda at midnight on Broadway,
beautiful gorgeous blondes, brunettes, —
But I hate the fumes of 34th St.
A strange aura of masochism
and even of homosexuality
in Christian Catholicism
— “He will give you a
taste of joys & delights that
transcend anything” — etc —
. . . That’s the homosexuality . . .
“praying to God to rid you of
your desires and abase you thus”
the masochism —
Why?
You cant beat the Tao —
the Buddha — the Guru of
the Far East — “and Jesus
will make it easy” — Really
my dear — Nothin’s easy.

The difference between Merton
and me, is, I didnt fall
for the columbia jester

TANGIERS 1957

Blowing in an afternoon wind,
on a white fence,
A cobweb

March wind from the sea — a lonely dobe house
with red tiled roof, on a highway boulevard,
by white garages and new apartment buildings
in ruined field — everything in place in the inscrutable
sunny air, no meaning in the sky and
a girl running by coughing! It is very strange how
the green hills are full of trees and white houses
without comment. I think Tangiers is some kind
of city. Man and son cross road, wearing
green Sabbath fez caps, like papercup cakes
good nuf to eat — I think I’m sposed to be
alive — I dont see anything around — Drops
of whitewash on this red concrete plaza with
the whitewashed tower by the sea for
Muezzins of the Sherifian Star — The
other night, here, Arab bagpipes —

Spring is coming —
Yep, all that equipment
For sighs

ZOCO CHICO — TANGIERS —

a weird Sunday in Fellaheen
Arabland with you’d expect
mystery white windows &
do see but b God the broad
up there in whiten
my-veil is sitting & peering
by a Red Cross, above a lil
sign says PRACTICANTES
Servicio Permanente
TF NO.9766
the cross being red — this
is over a tobacco shop
with luggage & pictures,
a little barelegged boy
leaning on counter with a
family of wristwatched
Spaniards — Limey sailors
from the submarines pass
trying to get drunker & drunker
yet quiet & lost in home
regret & two little Arab
hepcats have a brief musical
confab (boys of 10) & they
part with a push of arms
& wheeling of arms, the cat
has a yellow skullcap &
a blue zoot suit

I am now hi on
MAHOUN
MAHOUN
Cakes of kief boiled with
spices & candies —
eaten with hot tea —
the black & white tiles
of the outdoor cafe
are soiled by lonely
Tangiers time — A
little bald cropped
boy walks by, goes
to men at table,
says “Yo!” then
the waiter throws
him out, “Yig” —
A brown ragged robe
priest sits with me at
table, but looks
off with hands
on lap at brilliant
red fez & red girl
sweater & red boy
shirt green scene

RAILROAD BUFFET IN AVIGNON

A priest who looks exactly
like Bing Crosby but with a long gray beard,
chewing bread, then rushes out, with beret and
briefcase. . . . .

PARIS SIDEWALK CAFE

Now, on sidewalk in
sun, the racket of going-to-work same as
in Houston or in Boston and no better —
But it is a vast promise I feel here, endless
streets, stores, girls, places, meanings, I can
see why Americans stay here — First
man in Paris I looked at was a dignified
Negro gentleman in a homburg — The human
types are endless, old French ladies, Malayan
girls, schoolboys, blond student boys, tall
young brunettes, hippy pimply secretaries,
beret’d goggled clerks, beret’d scarved
earners of milk bottles, dikes in long blue
laboratory coats, frowning older students striding
in trench coats like Boston, seedy little
rummy cops fishing thru their pockets (in
blue caps), cute pony tailed blondes in high
heels with zip notebooks, goggled bicyclists
with motors attached, bespectacled homburgs
walking reading Le Parisien, bushy headed
mulattos with long cigarettes in mouth,

old ladies carrying milkcans & shopping bags,
rummy WCFieldses spitting in the gutter hands
a pockets going to their printing shop for
another day, a young Chinese looking French
girl of 12 with separated teeth looking
Like she’s in tears (frowning, & with a bruise
on her shin, schoolbooks in hand, cute and
serious like Mardou), porkpie executive
running and catching bus sensationally
vanishing with it, mustached long haired
Italian youths, regular types coming in
the bar for their morning shot of wine,
huge bumbling bankers in expensive suits
fishing for newspaper pennies in their
palms (bumping into women at the bus
stop), piped jews with packages, a
lovely redhead with dark glasses pip pip
pip on her heels trots to work bus, a
waitress slopping mop water in the old old
gutter, ravishing brunettes with tightfitting
skirts succeeding in making you want to
grab their rounded ass (tho they dont deign
to look), goofely plup plup schoolgirlies
with long boyish bobs plirping lips over
books & memorizing lessons fidgetly, lovely
young girls of 17 on corners who walk
off with low-heeled sure-strides in long
red coats to downtown Paris smokepot
Old Napoleon wonders — leading a dog,
an apparent East Indian, whistling, with
books — bearded bus riders riding to
accounting school — dark similar-lipped
serious young lovers, boy arming girlshoulders
— statue of Danton pointing nowhere —

— Paris hepcat in dark glasses waiting there,
faintly mustached — little suited boy in
black beret, with well off father — English
Flag waving, red and white crisscrossing on
a blue field — (for Queen’s visit)

PARIS PARK

Sitting in a little park in Place Paul Painlevé
— a curving row of beautiful rosy tulips rigid
and swaying, fat shaggy sparrows, beautiful
shorthaired mademoiselles (one shd. never be
alone at night in Paris, boy or girl, but I’m
an evil old man & world hater who will
become the greatest writer who ever lived)

RESTING BY A WINDOW IN THE LOUVRES

— Seine outside, Carrousel Bridge, gray
rain clouds, pushing overhead, blue sky
holes, Seine ripple silver, old dark
stone & houses, distant domes, skeletal
Eiffel, people on sidewalks like Guardini’s
little brushstroke people — (with black
dot heads) — In this Vast hall where I
sit, more’n 600 feet long, with dream
giant canvases everywhere, the murmur
blur of hundreds of voices — Seine waters
restlessly greening near the bridge, trees
blooming, tomorrow London —

Downtown London Spring 1957 (sketch) —
hammering of iron, banging of planks, a
drill, rrrttt, humbuzz of traffic, morble
of voices, peet of bird, dling of wrench
falling on pavement (or of bolt screwer),
truck going brruawp, squeak of brakes,
the impersonal bangbang & beep beep
of London still building long after
Shakespeare & Blake lie bedded in
stone & sheep — April in London,
Where is Gray?

TRAIN TO SOUTHAMPTON

Brain trees growing out of Shakespeare’s fields
— dreaming meadows full of lamb-dots —
The dreary town of St. Denys, a church with a
pasted-on concrete arch on the roof, the
crowded row of redbrick houses, old man in
a garden blossoming a new English Spring
which seems to me hope-devoid. . . . .

SOUTHHAMPTON — ridiculous little boxcars in the
yards . . . cranes in the haze . . . cyclists . . .
little boy sitting a wall horse style, with boots
... fweet of our engine —

BACK TO AMERICA AND MEXICO SKETCH SATURDAY MEXICO 1957

For a long time I didnt notice that
a big dog was laying in the grass
six feet behind me, completely
licenseless, no collar, naked &
glad the true dog sleeps, when
I call him he pays no attention,
right in the middle of the city
park he stretches & enjoys —
Meanwhile 2 little girls play
with a ball (too small to throw
it) as the mother waits patiently
standing with shopping bag — 2
boys kick the soccer ball &
then quit, one falls flat on
his back in the grass arms outspread
to the sky while the other
dances little steps & sings —
An ordinary man carrying an
empty pail — Two guys pulling
a roll truck with one tire on
it, talking — A little boy
comes by playing with a
plastic bottle tied around
his neck with straps —
Gangs of little children
rush up to push the park-
worker’s lawnmower with
him, he grins — A dark
Mexican kid with handfulstring
of huge balloons blowing
his little air tweeter —
The dog is up, near the
ball boys, watching nobly —
he hops on 3 legs, his right
front foot is broken or hurt,
now he hops up to see a
ragged boy’s white dog on
rope leash & a short fight
breaks out — The little boy
brings his dog over to tell me
the whole story (in Spanish)
of his wounds & bravery —
The ordinary man returns with
full pail, hobbling — The mother
& little girls, sit now on the
old iron cannon, she reads
as they crawl gladly — (I’m not
interested much in sex anymore, but
in that mother smiling patiently while
the little girls play)

SKETCH OF BEGGAR

The strange Allen Ansen-looking
but fat chubby Mexican beggar standing
in front of Woolworth’s on Coahuila
behaving spastically, with short haircut
of bangs, brown suitcoat, white shirt,
big pot belly, rocking back & forth
jiggling his hand (left or right, as / according
to which other he rests in his pocket)
& he really makes it, / I just saw 3 people give him
money in one minute, as one
charitied him he turned away &
scratched his brow (murmured something?)
— He cant conceive that
someone (as I) can be watching from
across the street 2nd story window
& so I see all his in-between
actions & attitudes, a definite
(holy) phoney, (I mean his
life is harder than mine by far),
when it came time for him to
blow his nose after sneezing
he didnt shake spastically
but efficiently withdrew a
napkin from his coat & blew
his nose hard 3 times then
put it back in his pocket
— Even poor women give him
coins & he places all of them
in a funny space behind his back
belt — His feet are tired, he
whomps them up in a dance &
down —

When fat businessman glides
by blowing smoke contemptly
at him he hangs his head in
contemplative shame — He
looks up, scratches his neck,
feels his coat pocket, sways,
& waits beneath the light
(as I)
(Who’ve just finished a T-bone
steak
in Kuku’s)

Above him I see dim
figures in the Woolworth
storerooms as of dance-
class-ing & mamboing

Being as I am now off drugs,
after a fine meal I feel like
I did as a kid in Lowell, an
excited happy mind — It’s
Saturday in Mex City & the streets
lead to all kinds of fascinating
lighted vistas, movies, stores, pepsi
colas, whorehouses, nightclubs,
children playing in brownstreet
lamps & the sleep of the
Fellaheen dog in some old
grand doorway

YES, the end to a perfect meal
is always the grand cup of
black coffee, here or in
Sweets Seafood Restaurant, NY
or in Paree, anywhere, the
warm rich comforter (which
prepares the appetite for chocolates
on the homeward walk, preferably
milk chocolate & nuts) —
It’s the exciting hour in MCity
or anycity, 8 on Sat nite, when
the 5 & 10’s closing & the show
crowds rush & newsboys shout,
trolley bells clang, like soft
like Lowell long ago when
I had that swarming vision

PENGUIN POETS

JOHN ASHBERY

Selected Poems
Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror

TED BERRIGAN

The Sonnets

JIM CARROLL

Fear of Dreaming:
The Selected Poems
Living at the Movies
Void of Course
ALISON HAWTHORNE

DEMING

Genius Loci

CARL DENNIS

New and Selected
Poems 1974-2004
Practical Gods
Ranking the Wishes

DIANE DI PRIMA

Loba

STUART DISCHELL

Dig Safe

STEPHEN DOBYNS

Mystery, So Long
Velocities:
New and Selected
Poems: 1966-1992

AMY GERSTLER

Crown of Weeds
Ghost Girl
Nerve Storm

EUGENE GLORIA

Drivers at the Short-
Time Motel
Hoodlum Birds

DEBORA GREGER

Desert Fathers,
Uranium Daughters
God
Western Art

TERRANCE HAYES

Hip Logic
Wind in a Box

ROBERT HUNTER

Sentinel and Other
Poems

MARY KARR

Viper Rum

JACK KEROUAC

Book of Blues
Book of Haikus
Book of Sketches

ANN LAUTERBACH

Hum
If in Time:
Selected Poems,
1975-2000
On a Stair

CORINNE LEE

PYX

PHYLLIS LEVIN

Mercury

WILLIAM LOGAN

Macbeth in Venice
Night Battle
The Whispering
Gallery

MICHAEL MCCLURE

Huge Dreams:
San Francisco
and Beat Poems

DAVID MELTZER

David’s Copy:
The Selected Poems
of David Meltzer

CAROL MUSKE

An Octave Above
Thunder
Red Trousseau

ALICE NOTLEY

The Descent of Alette
Disobedience
Mysteries of Small
Houses

PATTIANN ROGERS

Generations

STEPHANIE

STRICKLAND

V: WaveSon.nets/
Losing L’una

ANNE WALDMAN

Kill or Cure
Marriage: A Sentence
Structure of the
World Compared
to a Bubble

JAMES WELCH

Riding the Earthboy
40

PHILIP WHALEN

Overtime: Selected
Poems

ROBERT WRIGLEY

Lives of the Animals
Reign of Snakes

MARK YAKICH

Unrelated Individuals
Forming a Group
Waiting to Cross

JOHN YAU

Borrowed Love Poems