MEXICO CITY BLUES
Other Works by Jack Kerouac
Published by Grove Press
Dr. Sax
Lonesome Traveler
Satori in Paris and Pic (one volume)
The Subterraneans
MEXICO CITY BLUES
Jack Kerouac
Copyright © 1959 by Jack Kerouac
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969.
Mexico City blues / Jack Kerouac.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9568-5
I. Title.
PS3521.E735M4 1990
813’.54—dc20 90-2748
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
MEXICO CITY BLUES
MEXICO CITY BLUES
NOTE
I want to be considered a jazz poet
blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam
session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses;
my ideas vary and sometimes roll from
chorus to chorus or from halfway through
a chorus to halfway into the next.
1st Chorus
Butte Magic of Ignorance
Butte Magic
Is the same as no-Butte
All one light
Old Rough Roads
One High Iron
Mainway
Denver is the same
“The guy I was with his uncle was
the governor of Wyoming”
“Course he paid me back”
Ten Days
Two Weeks
Stock and Joint
“Was an old crook anyway”
The same voice on the same ship
The Supreme Vehicle
S. S. Excalibur
Maynard
Mainline
Mountain
Merudvhaga
Mersion of Missy
2nd Chorus
Man is not worried in the middle
Man in the Middle
Is not Worried
He knows his Karma
Is not buried
But his Karma,
Unknown to him,
May end –
Which is Nirvana
Wild men
Who kill
Have Karmas
Of ill
Good men
Who love
Have Karmas
Of dove
Snakes are Poor Denizens of Hell
Have come surreptitioning
Through the tall grass
To face the pool of clear frogs
3rd Chorus
Describe fires in riverbottom
sand, and the cooking;
the cooking of hot dogs
spitted in whittled sticks
over flames of woodfire
with grease dropping in smoke
to brown and blacken
the salty hotdogs,
and the wine,
and the work on the railroad.
$275,000,000,000.00 in debt
says the Government
Two hundred and seventy five billion
dollars in debt
Like Unending
Heaven
And Unnumbered Sentient Beings
Who will be admitted –
Not-Numberable –
To the new Pair of Shoes
Of White Guru Fleece
O j o!
The Purple Paradise
4th Chorus
Roosevelt was worth 6, 7 million dollars
He was Tight
Frog waits
Till poor fly
Flies by
And then they got him
The pool of clear rocks
Covered with vegetable scum
Covered the rocks
Clear the pool
Covered the warm surface
Covered the lotus
Dusted the watermelon flower
Aerial the Pad
Clean queer the clear
blue water
AND THEN THEY GOT HIM
The Oil of the Olive
Bittersweet taffies
Bittersweet cabbage
Cabbage soup made right
A hunk a grass
Sauerkraut let work
in a big barrel
Stunk but Good
5th Chorus
I am not Gregory Corso
The Italian Minnesinger –
Of the Song of Corsica –
Subioso Gregorio Corso –
The Haunted Versemaker
King
Of Brattle Street.
In streets of snow
He wove the show
And worried in tunnels
And mad dog barked
KIND KING MIND
Allen Ginsberg called me
William Burroughs
Is William Lee
Samuel Johnson
Is Under the sea
Rothridge Cole parter
Of Peppers
Is Numbro
Elabora
If you know what I
p a l a b r a
6th Chorus
This Thinking is Stopped.
Buddha’s Secret Moonlight: – is
the Ancient Virtue of laying up
and thinking happy & comfortable
thoughts – This, which modern
Society has branded “Loafing,” is
made available to people now
apparently only by junk.
Self depends on existence of other
self, and so no Solo Universal Self
exists – no self, no other self,
no innumerable selves, no
Universal self and no ideas
relating to existence or non-
existence thereof –
The Greatest, Who Has Undertaken
to Comfort Innumberable Beings
The Kind One
The Art-of-Kindness Master
The Master of Wisdom
The Great Ferryman
The Great Vehicle Being
7th Chorus
He Who is Free From Arbitrary Conceptions
of Being or Non-Being
The Genius of the Elephant
The Destroyer of Elephant-Trainers
by Death
The Destroyer of Elephants by Death
The Destroyer of Death
The Destroyer and Exterminator
of Death
Exterminator of Being and Non-Being
Tathagata
The Essence Master
The Womb
The Manifestor
Man’s Made Essence
Essence’s Made Man
The Maker of Light
The Destroyer of Light
8th Chorus
Mysterious Red Rivers of the North –
Obi Ubang African Montanas
of the Gulchy Peary
&n
bsp; Earth –
Lakes of Light – Old Seas –
Mississippi River, Chicago,
the Great Lakes –
The Small Rivers like Indiana,
the Big Ones
Like Amazon.
Joliet flew.
Alma, the River of Snowy Love
– Amida, of Brightest
Perfect
Compassion
The Tamiyani Trail across
the Everglades –
Ai la ra la
la rai la ra –
Singing breasts of women
of earth receiving
Juicy Rivers – red earth
9th Chorus
We’re all taking short cut
Through Death Valley
The Volcanic Mountains
And the Lizard Ice
And the Lice of Sand
– Lhasas of Weedblack
Cock Rock Philtrite –
Redwoods so Huge
They climb passes by God –
The Giant Angels
In the Washington D C Blue Sky
– – The Heroines of Cathedral
Fellaheen Mexico –
Commenting on the Great Cities
of the World,
The Blue Marvel of New Orleans
(land a swamps)
Ingers had done windows
with penal Australia
too – pear Attantisatasa
the Central Essential
Indy Portuga
coit
10th Chorus
The great hanging weak teat of India
on the map
The Fingernail of Malaya
The Wall of China
The Korea Ti-Pousse Thumb
The Salamander Japan
the Okinawa Moon Spot
The Pacific
The Back of Hawaiian Mountains
coconuts
Kines, balconies, Ah Tarzan –
And D W Griffith
the great American Director
Strolling down disgruntled
Hollywood Lane
– to toot Nebraska,
Indian Village New York,
Atlantis, Rome,
Peleus and Melisander,
And
swans of Balls
Spots of foam on the ocean
11th Chorus
Brown wrote a book called
The White and the Black
N a r c o t i c C i t y
switchin on
Anger Falls –
(musician stops,
brooding on bandstand)
12th Chorus
Indian songs in Mexico
(the Folk Chanties of Children
at dusk jumprope –
at Saturday Night power failure –)
are like the little French Canuckian
songs my mother sings –
Indian Roundelays –
Row Canoe –
Ma ta wacka
Johnny Picotee
Wish-tee
Wish-tee
Negwayable
Tamayara
Para ya
Aztec squeaks
(ONLY THE MOTHERS ARE HAPPY)
13th Chorus
I caught a cold
From the sun
When they tore my heart out
At the top of the pyramid
O the ruttle tooty blooty
windowpoopies
of Fellah Ack Ack
Town that russet noon
when priests dared
to lick their lips
over my thumping meat
heart –
the Sacrilegious beasts
Ate me 10,000 million
Times & I came back
Spitting Pulque
in Borracho
Ork
Saloons
of old Sour Azteca
Askin for more
I popped outa Popocatapetl’s
Hungry mouth
14th Chorus
And when they saw me
Rowin my sailin canoe
Across the lake of dreams
In the Lotus Valley Swamp,
And arrested me
For the size
Of my heart,
T’s’ then I decided
‘Don’t Come Back’
They’ll eat your heart alive
Every time.
But there’s more blood
I shed
Outa my pumpin heart
At Teotihuacan
And everywhere else
Including Turban Block,
Lookout, Ork –
I got more water
Pissed in the Ocean
As a sailor of the several
seas
Than Sallow’s
Aphorism
will allow
15th Chorus
Meaning –
I’m just an old calvert
cross
dead of die pork
I believe in the sweetness
of Jesus
And Buddha –
I believe
In St.Francis,
Avaloki
Tesvara,
the Saints
Of First Century
India A D
And Scholars
Santivedan
And Otherwise
Santayanan
Everywhere
16th Chorus
Santayana meaning,
holy vehicle,
Uno –
One Cross
One Way
One Cave inward
down
to
moon
Shining essences
of universes of stars
disseminated into powder
and dust –
blazing
in the dynamo
of our thoughts
in the forge
of the moon
In the June
of black bugs
in your bed
of hair earth
17th Chorus
Starspangled Kingdoms bedecked
in dewy joint –
DON’T IGNORE OTHER PARTS
OF YOUR MIND, I think,
And my clever brain sends
ripples of amusement
Through my leg nerve halls
And I remember the Zigzag
Original
Mind
of Babyhood
when you’d let the faces
crack & mock
& yak & change
& go mad utterly
in your night
firstmind
reveries
talking about the mind
The endless Not Invisible
Madness Rioting
Everywhere
18th Chorus
The bottom of the repository
human mind
The Kingdom of the Mind,
The Kingdom has come.
It’s the only thing you got free,
the Mind
Per Se Williams, the critic
and author,
Slept in a rainbow
When he discovered
the perfect accommodation
of Universal Mind
in its active aspect
You’ll have a Period of Golden Age
Restitution of Loss
I’ve had all I can Eat
Revisiting Russet towns
Of long ago
On carpets of bloody sawdust
19th Chorus
Christ had a dove on his shoulder
– My brother Gerard
Had 2 Doves
And 2 Lambs
Pulling his Milky Chariot.
Immersed in fragrant old
spittoon water
He was Baptized by Iron
Priest Saint Jacques
De Fournier in Lowell
Massachusetts
In the Gray
Rain Year,
1919
When Chaplin had Spats
and Dempsey
Drank no whisky by the track.
My mother saw him in heaven
Riding away, prophesying
Everything will be alright
Which I have learned now
By Trial & Conviction
In the Court of Awful Glots
20th Chorus
The Art of Kindness A Limping Sonnet
How the art of kindness doth excite,
The ressure and the intervening tear,
What horizons have they fled,
What old time’s blearest dream!
But atta pressure of the Two Team,
Finding nothing to surfeit the bloated corpse,
Rabbed the Whole She bo be bang
And rounded them a Team.
Beam! Bleam! So no one cared.
Except the High Financier.
Ah, but wine was never Made
That sorely tongues gave grace & aid.
Because I cant write a sonnet
Does that make me Shakespeare?
There’s a sonnet of the lotus
A rubicund rose
Death in a rose
Is prouder than satin
Emerald Isles
Blest
In the Archipelagoan
Shore –
Ferry’s arrived.
21st Chorus
Not very musical, the Western ear
– No lyres in the pines
compare with the palms
Western Sorcery is Sad Science –
Mechanics go mad
In Nirvanas of hair
and black oil
and rags of dust
and lint of flint
Hard iron fools raging in the gloom
But here’s East, Cambodian
Saloons of Air
And Clouds Blest.
Blakean Angel Town.
Grove of Beardy Trees
& Bearded Emptily –
Expressing Patriarchal
Authority
To us listeners
Of the Holy See
Saw,
said,
Saved
Saved my Bhikkucitas
22nd Chorus
Saved my bhikkucitos
for the holy hair
that was found wanting
in merde air –
Ninety devils jokin with me
And I’m running on the catwalk
At Margaritee
Jumping from car to car
In a 60 mile freight
Runnin up the pass maw
Tunnel Gore waited Ore