Reading collected poems of Kerouac, musing over haikus:
"The cow, taking a big
dreamy crap, turning
To look at me"
"Train tunnel, too dark
for me to write: that
'Men are ignorant'" [562]
Jack with the long, dull stare. The blankness belies the deep understanding of movement. The facts of a scene. "This is what is happening. Unencumbered."
Realness that has been degregated today. Real is overly subjective, with currents, and politics, and emotions, and narcissism. Real as not what is, but it means in who I want to show the fake me to be.
Jack looking out from the bus window. Enmeshed in the slatted bench on the dry wood porches of the general store. Hazily awake through lace curtains and hand crafted glass.
"Run after that
body - run after
A raging fire" [527]
"Mild spring night -
a teenage girl said
'Good evening' in the dark" [560]
Hungry poets, looking for truth in moments. Unencumbered by sights, smells or touch. Emblazoned in your mind with words instead. Hungry for feeling. Rawness. Newness. Sensualness. A deep faith.
"Jack Kerouac...was a Catholic poet - his cross was not a plain cross, not a Protestant cross, stripped of the body of the sacrificed man-God....his own heart that bled like an iron rose, a Rose-En-Fer....the depths of infinite thoughts." [xxi]
"To be a poet's poet is to hurt. To hurt singularly, to hurt incomprehensibloy, to suffer a wound that never heals..." [xxix]
Jack, awash in an abandoned supermarket parking lot, finding meaning in purple flowers. A needy cat at home that interrupted his reading of Zen koans. A poet who wrote in spurts, three words and done. Then tracts and tracts on rolls and reams. Eternity of nothingness, then of God, then of the Devil, then of cows dreamily staring at him with their empty orbs as they shit in a hot Missouri field.
[Reading "Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems" edited by Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell, Library of America, 2012.]
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