by Jack Kerouac
Think happy thoughts of the Buddha who abides throughout detestable phenomena like lizards and man eating ogres, with perfect compassion and blight, caring not one way or the other the outcome of our term of time because celestial birds are singing in the golden heaven. In the golden hall of the Buddha, think, I am already ensconced on a tray of gold, invisible and radiant with singing, by the side of my beloved hand, which has done its work and exists no more to tone up the troubles of this birth-and-death imaginary world—And that’s because the Old Angel Midnight is a Fike—that’s because the Old Angel Midnight never was. And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves, many heads bend beneath the light, arguments are raving avid lipt and silly in silly secular rooms silly seconsular rooms full of height agee—Swam! reacht the other shore, folded, in magnificence, shouldered the wheel of iron light, and shuddered no more, and rowed the fieldstar across her bed of ashen samsara sorrow towards in here, the bliss evermore.
So.
Saw sight saver & fixt him.—Love you all, children, happy days and happy dreams and happy thoughts forevermore—
Dont forget to put a dime in the coin box by dipping your finger in ancid inkl the holy old forevermore holy water & bleep blap bloop the sign a the cross, when facing the altar down the aisle when you’re waltzing—Ding! Up you go, smoke
8The Mill Valley trees, the pines with green mint look and there’s a tangled eucalyptus hulk stick fallen thru the late sunlight tangle of those needles, hanging from it like a live wire connecting it to the ground—just below, the notches where little Fred sought to fell sad pine—not bleeding much—just a lot of crystal sap the ants are mining in, motionless like cows on the grass & so they must be aphyds percolatin up a steam to store provender in their bottomless bellies that for all I know are bigger than bellies of the Universe beyond—The little tragic windy cottages on the high last cityward hill and today roosting in sun hot dream above the tree head of seas and meadowpatch whilst tee-kee-kee-pearl the birdies & mommans mark & ululate moodily in this valley of peaceful firewood in stacks that make you think of Oregon in the morning in 1928 when Back was home on the range lake and his hunting knife threw away and went to sit among the Ponderosa Pines to think about love his girl’s bare bodice like a fennel seed the navel in her milk bun—Shorty McGonigle and Roger Nulty held up the Boston Bank and murdered a girl in these old woods and next you saw the steely green iron photograph in True Detective showing black blotches in the black blotch running culvert by the dirty roadside not Oregon at all, or Jim Back so happy with his mouth a blade of grass depending—
Hummingbird hums
hello—bugs
Race and swoop
Two ants hurry
to catch up
With lonely Joe
The tree above
me is like
A woman’s thigh
Smooth Eucalyptus bumps
and muscle swells
I would I were a weed
a week, would leave.
Why was the rat
mixed up
in the sun?
Because Buddhidharma came from the West with dark eyebrows, and China had a mountain wall, and mists get lost above the Yangtze Gorge and this is a mysterious yak the bird makes, yick,—wowf wow wot sings the dog blud blut blup below the Homestead Deer—red robins with saffron scarlet or orange rud breasts make a racket in the dry dead car crash tree Neal mentioned “He went off the road into a eucalyptus” and “it’s all busting out,” indicating the prune blossoms and Bodhidharma came from the India West to seek converts to his wall-gazing and ended up with Zen magic monks mopping each and one and all and other in mud koan puddles to prove the crystal void.
Wow
9Lookin over der sports page I see assorted perms written in langosten field hand that wd make the 2 silhouetted movie champeens change their quiet dull dialog to something fog—ah, Old Angel Midnight, it will be all over in a year.
Dying is ecstasy.
I’m not a teacher, not a sage, not a Roshi, not a writer or master or even a giggling dharma bum I’m my mother’s son & my mother is the universe—
What is this universe
but a lot of waves
And a craving desire
is a wave
Belonging to a wave
in a world of waves
So why put any down,
wave?
Come on wave, WAVE!
The heehaw’s dobbin
spring hoho
Is a sad lonely yurk
for your love
Wave lover.
I would I were a little tiny Jesus examining the mystery above the lightbody-cloud of the moon on still Marin nights, the flowers are my moon goddesses, & take craps naked. Horrible delightful the old retired harridan joys that wobble on the walking stick hill with nervous Collies yarking Yowk here in Journal Town where I wobble the card crate prayer bead Juju box with swing of wordage while Chas Olson reads my prose, man of the broad mysterious smoky Mountain Morn. (And everything is non-existent), heh.—
In a universe of waves quel difference betwixt one wave & t’other? T s all the same wavehood & every little unlocatable electron is a Tathagata pouring electromagnetic gravitational light at the constant speed of light (which can be heard in the sound of silence) & so this endless radiation of mysterious radiance is merely the minutia magnificent endless Tathagata Womb manifesting itself multiply & so not at all, for, all things are no-things but if this bores you it’s because you want bricks in your soup. Empty.
The Happy One is free
It’s a mystical mystery
It’s endless light
The golden eternity
Why read Don Quixote when you can read The Diamond Sutra or the Wonderful Law Lotus Sutra? Why read Mickey Spillane when you can read Gary Snyder & Philip Whalen & the Mexico City Blues? Why hide what you mean behind natural data?
What does it mean that True Nature is incomprehensibly beyond the veil of our senses and is like empty light? It means that True Nature is incomprehensibly beyond the veil of our senses & is like empty light. If someone were to say to me, Krap, cart your daddy over here & let’s hear tarbey? I’d say Wap, how’n you can cray that way when small fot find out all Sond your Oo like Where you like me & You like Me & OO La Koo Me the onta logical philosizer fonted in the crap ding? He’d say, Froo, this Sunday Blues is too tree drunk & dead tree, & I’d say push out the cork & can it, vant more moonshine potatovodka or go to church or tet, shet, the Lord is all this.
The American Dreamer
Star of Karuna
The Moon of Pity
Ti jean
A grat big sweaty wave—You get a vision of the truth as the universe of electrical waves all of it pure ecstasy then you open the old sutras and all you see no matter how many pages you turn over is human egoism & warnings—bah—I am the new Buddha—and I shall call myself ELECTRON—Why the all this hassel over what you do when there’s no time no space no mind just illusion & mystery? It’s sheer ignorance & old-fashion’d God fear—Why shd I fear Myself?—It’s like looking at a movie high & insteada the story you see swarming electrical particles each one a bliss fwamming in the screen eternally—shit! I’m going to the other side.
I dont need precepts
I need love
I need the Vision of Love
VISIONS OF LOVE
This holy and all universe is a wonderful white wild power, why, hell, should, heaven, interfere, words, waiting, flesh, sure, I, know, write, poems, this is no way to make it into the blessedness sweetly to be perceived, believed, & acted upon. Be silent & real. I feel very displeased, I just stood on my head & my neck is sore. But I’ll jump like a gazelle at six. Good God how can I ever die standing on my head each day 5 minutes?
I feel very pleased now, 5 minutes later. The whole system is washed both ways. I’ll invent a pack-board that you haul up yourself, lashed, to a pulley, & tie to a bit, & hang upsidedown at ease, for old age. For thi
s is the True Way. It is gravitational forces. It makes me eat & run into the yard & wash & forget all about electrical.
Dont touch me, I’m full
of snakes
(say the psychopathic flips)
Fanny fancy—
thou done
That crap
Gary (Snyder) gone
like smoke
—My lonely shoes
My rugged huge blue shoes
10Morning sun—
the purple petals,
Four have fallen
Somavilerd, who thot that no one loved him, got himself reborn a dozen million times in various-around world systems in order to prove that the reason was his own detestableness, but his detestableness didnt belong to him because there is no ego owning going on anywhere in the universal dream only endless talk & twaddle & tales of idiots—told for nothing & waving like leaves of a sea of trees in the birdy tweeking morning when motors & valleys bourk—Fanny the Spider built a web from sill to flower stem, pot, winejug, & Donlin declined—ling ba twa laramenooki Wi the bugs interwooped like zing planes in the heatening mornlull & full sperm spof smudge re testified the empty fertilities with a new mistake—milky mistakes abounding & spoffing everywhere from crap cellars to courtesan silkbed in Minarette—& all went to prove that in the golden eternity old angel midnight never happened & in North Beach the cold hopeless fog mist on Monday Morning, after binges with Sublette & Donlin who sleep all day & only wake to drink another jug—I dont understand this suffering but there’s no ego owning in sufferunderstanding either—And all the combined sounds one hummin gnoise—Cats yawn I’d like to yawn I’d like to not like and begone bechune & bejesus if what on earth & under heck & over shit we gonna do O hopeless ghosts?—IL PICCOLO CAFFE what they do there, Vallejo!—I’d never’ve known f twasnt for Ma & Pa—As many times’ I relight the Wizard Pipe it goes out—That’s the store—nothing hidden the stash is a free treasure—God aint cached—All I take in I put out again, it’s a filthy channel designed to drive me mad—Lo Lord what did I buy, what did you sell? What kinda bamboo poles you got in that merlasses brarrel of Yours, Avalokitesvara?—Shut up & let the nose go—try not asking—spiratual ecstasy is nothing—the rhinestone in the juju is the rhinestone in the juju, & your table she’s small—and yr wife put you out & screwed a Porto Rican—the jumble of events is a thing—I’ll ask why till I fly. The potter dwelling in his humble claypot strung this rote together to while the whelom along the dry clay woman bank where children cling to their mother’s back & Father’s Falling—into Mother—bing bang the Yabyum News—bing bang the bolt in the void—Pop ping the electromagnetic in the gravitational the yang in the yin—the positive making the negative different, the negative holds the positive, & so I’m sick—& so I know—I’m sick—Sugata
11Laurel Dell camp, boo! Cow swung my shirt around, deers hooftrompled my sleep, moon was like a streetlamp in my face, & I didnt sleep till the big cat who came down the pyramid wall in the morning where I told Ma about Mamie Eisenhour’s drunk & I got my diploma & we landed & she threw her ice cream drunk & I was glad about something ephemeral & during the night I willed to leap outa my sleep wildly but it took some dead & inert time—the Book of Dreams & all my words, hurt—I’m goin back to my cabin & write Sweet Mother & Son slowly & gladly
12Lou Little explaining to the newsreel audience how this football player went mad & shows how on a Columbia Practice Hillside it started with father & son, the gray reaches of the Eternity Library beyond—I go visit my sweet Alene in her subterranean pad near the 3rd Avenue El & Henry St of old Mike Mike milkcan Ashcan Lower Eastside Dreams & pink murders & there she wont ope the door because I cant get the job I tried so hard to get & the woman said my form wasnt right but Neal made it but regretfully it is he’s shipping, out & I’m on the ship with him telling him “If you wash dishes dont say a word, if you’re a yeoman do yr work all well”—I can see he hates to go without me to this other Grayshore—Sitting before my stove on a cold gray Saturday morning with my coffee & my pipe, eating jello—remembering the little jello cartoon that filled me with such joy as a kid on Sarah Avenue, the little prince wouldnt take pheasant or delicate birds or celestial puddings or even Mominuan Icecream but when the little bird brought him jello inverted in a rill mold cup he went wild & saved the kingdom, red jello like mine, in the little dear lovable pages—of long ago—My form is delight delight delight
Ring, ring, ring—
Shh, the sky is empty—
Shh, the earth is empty—
Look out, look in, shh—
The essence of jello is the essence of arrangement—
Be nice to the monster crab, it’s only another arrangement of that which you are
13Bobby Mathews of Philadelphia & Ed Crane of NY accomplished the feat before 1900 (striking out 4 men in 1 inning)—O those old ballgames, O lost Foleys of South Boston in old time Boston raw drump drunk days I love you—Geo Hooks Wiltse of the Giants did it on May 15, 1906 when my father was 17 years old in his pinksuspendered primal origin blues—when Old Jacques Kerouac raved behind the woodstove on church sunday mornings with his jug & today is May 28 1956 & me & Bob Donlin (Donnelly of Visions of Gerard) are drinking port in McCorkle’s shack & the wind roars thru the shoh trees—Alright, mothers &sons, I’ll write for ye & tell a long sweet dad tale—For all is the same happy purity! Ya, padawaddy I like to frail them broadies Peer Engeli icecream backseat redleather creamcome fuck O cone!—let me love you again, sweet baby—this will do till nextyear’s orgasm do—overhead levy assembling eastboat taxers hotson foundries bringin Alene Melville to my motherlovin arms Ah sweet indescribable verdurous parapineta post-wallowing rail ron hung on bu-bu-Angel’s Telephoto let Anita Ekberg Pali shorts & all thu—so Miss’sippi Gene could go Hmf in his trance car blues—Why dash?—Sip.
14Because while Gore Bedavalled marvels he steps, Ole Robeflow, from isle to isle into Mrs Roocco’s windrow to innerstate the gas meek and bring photons, neutrons, pootons, borons, & oromariavalosa perstarolingish pert part pomerance poons, Topki, to flash in the mokswarm smugbug television vision intertaining trains twain by trallis—radamasanthus the watermelon bone—Higgins diddle, the redsox sunboys’ll be in 4th place June & 5th place december & that’s all, beancod—On top of Vulturesque Desolation the train orders’ll oughta be simpler than twine 4 Engineer’s an old anarchistic fud—Shoot, pot, proms were flowery purple lilac Richmond eve roadsters redlegs sweetdolls & wild palms bleeding on the reincarnated seabach father pramming oysters in a poppy corn basket with holy scowl—Robeflow disappears into the Golden Age with a falting tired didnt-make-it hand like Homer blind Demosthenes Dumb & Aristophanes may squat on the Peloponnesian Xertian defeat of our times for this is Prak, the Greek Jew, the Canuck Hindu, prolling, purned, spoot, spout, teapot, drank, drilled, dripped, dvished, pish, tish. It was just a lottawords foir nathing—noneless the railyards produced littlegirls, & up above the boyshadows the stars as Karuna as ever burned mighty rot glows that evaginated & opened holy rose hopes Oh ho for the penisenvious thunderbers & boomdockers from Hook to Hey Here & heave that caffeine down, old ladycakes & frogmurder rivers & Angelo Noon running write a bleak glare inseparably terrified the parkinglots of destiny—it’s all a lotta sand pilin up helplessly, harmlessly on itself obliterating the What Cave? If not oughta.
15Let’s dance—I go to your shack or you come to mine. Make a date. Do.
“Spring rain;
it begins to grow dark;
Today also is over.”
Care-a-Wack
Thus the dove advises—
I am woken to you—
16Rabeloid! I cant breathe any more Mrs Jameson so will you please whore out?—I’m drinkin with the butchers, shut up!—if that doesnt sound kind it’s because shittly aimed right at Tard & miss’t with an 8 point aim that might do little over Tokyo but Kyoto throwed it—as the later testify will show these brunettes of peanut butter & hate were made were made were built & wellmade O
crying children hurt!—So, I say, but knowing there’s no me, Grub.
That’s the saint
Stump—all on a stump the stump—accord yourself with a sweet declining woman one night—I mean by declining that she lays back & declines to say no—accuerdo ud. con una merveillosa—accorde tué, Ti Pousse, avec une belle femme folle pi vas’ t’ coucher—if ya dont understand s t t and tish, that langue, it’s because the langue just bubbles & in the babbling void O Lowsy Me I’se tihed—If I’da who what? the perfect lil cloudy coroid cloud colorods colombing in the back fish tail twill twat of heaven blue—What’s the blue, fly, what the drunk, fall, the wild upbuilding reinsurgence & Golden Ultimate Effulgence you’ll find in Train No. Let’s Go—to heaven—Bob Kauffman wants to come too—all aboard—You’ll find that this train has six thousand compartments—Ring!—Hello—Rail, please—They’re calling the Who Clerk—he’ll give us the right rail we’ll go to heaven sure—the sweet golden clime when the trav’ler’s journey is done, under the hill, in a cool tomb—death was too proud so I stopt—we communed underneath nature—and so on—first level yr own mind then the earth is be level & no more mountains of hope—but just the Slavic level flat expected crandall be-all & wise-all rhodomopordso-mopholorophoshion crint
17Saradalia wrote around the wrong rightness because he’d seen purple & gold visions swimming in consciously from the conscious ultra violet cosmic rays a the sun & fwang, twarl, tweeelll, twom, twerm I meant, Pearl, Immemorial Antequité Poil of Brooklyn Night-Bridge gray hope dreams sucking on the stairs the dead girl the new blues news of from Heaven endless radiations of magic blue salvation—Now how’d Kemp tell a fleapis when St. he’d a know’d there waint no Okie Song yander but Big Gorldpupple ringarond romp rillwash radamansus frallieng prodapiak, ratamita samantabhadra unceasing compassionate hope that with congruent bent stick as soon as he saw real deep & realized the lights were still there he understood he was a messenger, the Angel, one eye out—For Lucifer Moidner rant rag, rack, it’s okay, these purloined potato perfunctory alliterative rubouts add up to sweet Popish Purple Paradise