At Xmas they brought me a toy house
in and out of which
Caroline my sister
played little valentine
armies showing little sad
people of the prime
pip Vienna smalltoot
towns, with orchestras
of the square,
and in the brown light
of the kitchen I wondered
“What is this? – mystery of little people.
Is each one a frightening as me?
Is each one afraid as me?
Is each one got to sleep
in the dark at night?
Did any of them lil cardboard soldiers
See the Sun of Sadness at Six
In the windows of their snow slope?”
93rd Chorus
But I knew they hadnt.
They hadnt thought such thoughts.
No – I knew.
I knew I knew I knew.
It was like the Lankavatara
Scripture
I got to read 30 years later,
It said: “These little cardboard
Houses and people, may be real,
Considered as real, if you steal
Little reel from the wheel
Every neel till the eel
In the skeel keep the weal
Of all men intact in city
halls
Of poop hope.
In other words, son,
hang on – dont tip,
lose balance, see reality
in images like cardboard
– nor in the brown light
of this very kitchen.”
I pouted in my childhood.
94th Chorus
But now I will describe
The crazy people I’ve known.
These things.
My mother would take us
To a three story tenement
on Lakeview Avenue, still
standing there – washlines
of Araby hung from ropes
on the brown porch –
spend all day in there
talkin & gossipin –
lockin and rossipin
and plopperin and
dopperin and sopperin –
– it’s easy to go crazy
I go crazy sometimes.
Can’t get on with my story,
write it in verse.
Worse
Aint go no story, just verse
It was a crazy place to take us, I mean
95th Chorus
It was where I learned to say “door”
Meanwhile a thousand things
Were happening in the Maldoror wood
Of our neighborhood, Beaulieu Street
Up ahead, with rats of rat winery
And pestils and poolsharks
And pests of tenement crooners,
Looners – the dreary population
Of the world in 1924.
Two years old, I sat on the sidewalk
Contemplating time in white sand,
That was up on Burnaby Street.
Names of Silly Streets.
We have a meet to keep.
“Simplificus? Ridiculous?
Immensicus? Marvailovous!”
The wild a thousand and one thousand
things
To do & be done
when you’re a kiddy
of two or four
in the bright ball
inside your mind
of heaven given
joy.
96th Chorus
I tumbled down the street
On a tricycle, very fast,
I coulda kept going
And wound up in the river,
– Or across the trolley tracks
And got cobble mashed
And all smashed so that later on
I cant have grit dreams
Of Lakeview Avenue,
And see my father die,
Had I died at two –
But I saw my father die,
I saw my brother die,
I saw my mother die
my mother my mother my mother
inside me –
Saw the pear trees die,
the grapes, pearls, penny trees –
Saw little white collar girl
with little black dress
And spots of rose on each cheek,
die, in her glasses
In a coffin.
But I raced my bicycle safely.
97th Chorus
Meanwhile there’s my Pa, alone in street,
Coming for supper, under heaven bleak
The trees of March black twigs
Against the red & gory sundown
That blazed across the River
sinking in the ocean to the East
beyond Salisbury’s latest & last
grain of sand,
Then all’s wet underneath, to Eclipse
(Ivan the Heaven Sea-Ice King, Euclid,
Bloody Be Jupiter, Nucleus,
Nuclid, What’s-His-Name – the sea
The sea-drang Scholar with mermaids,
Bloody blasted dadflap thorn it
– Neppy Tune–)
All’s wet clear to Neptune’s Seat.
Sensing the aura, the news
Of that frost, my father
Hurries in his Woe-Street
Conscious he is a man
Doomed to mortal destiny.
“And my poor lil Ti Pousse,”
he thinks of me,
“He’ll get it too.”
98th Chorus
My father loves me,
my mother too,
I am all safe,
and so are you.
My father adores me
thinks I am cute
hates to see me
flash sheroot
Or bespatter bedspreads
with mule of infant
woodsy odors –
blash aroot
My old man’s only 28 years old
And is a young insurance salesman
And is confidently clacking down the street
And chuckling to think of the boys
And the poker game and gnaws
His fingernails worried about how fat
He’s getting, “no coal bill’s been
Highern this 1924 coalbill
I got to watch my dollars
Pretty soon the poorhouse” –
(“Wish I was God,” he adds to think)
99th Chorus
My father, Leo Alcide Kérouac
Comes in the door of the porch
On the way out to downtown red,
(where Neons Redly-Brownly Flash
An aura over the city center
As seen from the river where we lived)
– “Prap – prohock!” he’s coughing,
Busy, “Am,” bursting to part
the seams of his trousers with power
of assembled intentions.
“B-rrack – Brap?”
(as years later GJ would imitate him,
“your father, Zagg, he goes along,
Bre-hack! Brop?” Raising
his leg, bursting his face
to rouge outpop huge mad eyes
of “big burper balloons
of the huge world”)
To see if there’s any mail in the box
My father shoots 2 quick glances
Into all hearts of the box,
No mail, you see the flash of his anxious
Head looking in the void for nothing.
100th Chorus
That’s the porch of the Lupine house.
Afternoons I sleep upstairs,
In the sun, on the porch, in October,
I remember the dry leaves
in the blue sky.
I remember one day being parked in the
wickerbasket
Baby carriage, under huge old tree,
In family photos we’ve preserved it,
A great elm rising from dust
Of the little uphill road –
By dry hedges on a late afternoon
In November in the North, sun warm
But air cold, I am wrapt
And beswallered in sweet ebony
With wraps and puffcream caps
And chinkly pinkly pink baby,
Gleering at the world with little
wet lips,
Glad, Ah John,
– that tree is still standing
but the road has moved over.
Such is the might of the baby
in the seat
He hugens to re-double
the image, in words.
101st Chorus
We strove to go to movies
And re discover the happiness
of the baby –
We built up towers of prayer
in ivory and stone –
Roused denizens from their proper
rat-warrens –
“Simplificus the baby,
what hast thou thought,
should he be serried
and should we be clobber
the agent of the giant
in the picture?
or let him guess?
I say, let’s
let him guess.
Then he’ll come crying
& sneaking thru the tent
looking for the showing
of proud discontent,
the circus of mirkus,
pile it on thick,
– befriend –
it’s a show to go to movies
but a blow the baby be”
102nd Chorus
“See to it that he never ends,”
they might have added anyhow.
One never dies,
One’s never born
So sing the optimists
Of holy old religion,
trying to assuage –
Your shoes may look nice,
your baby buggies neater,
but one dies,
one’s born.
What the Tathagata of Buddhism
preaches,
The Prophet of Buddhahood
is that
nothing
is really
born nor dies
But that Ignorance is its Prince,
The essence never moved
From folded magnificence.
103rd Chorus
My father in downtown red
Walked around like a shadow
Of ink black, with hat, nodding,
In the immemorial lights of my dreams.
For I have since dreamt of Lowell
And the image of my father,
Straw hat, newspaper in pocket,
Liquor on the breath, barber shopshines,
Is the image of Ignorant Man
Hurrying to his destiny which is Death
Even though he knows it.
’S why they call Cheer,
a bottle, a glass, a drink,
A Cup of Courage –
Men know the mist is not their friend –
They come out of fields & put coats on
And become businessmen & die stale
The same loathsome stale death
They mighta died in countryside
Hills of dung.
My remembrance of my father
in downtown Lowell
walking like cardboard cut
across the lost lights
is the same empty material
as my father in the grave.
104th Chorus
I’d rather be thin than famous,
I dont wanta be fat,
And a woman throws me outa bed
Callin me Gordo, & everytime
I bend
to pickup
my suspenders
from the davenport
floor I explode
loud huge grunt-o
and disgust
every one
in the familio
I’d rather be thin than famous
But I’m fat
Paste that in yr. Broadway Show
105th Chorus
Essence is like absence of reality,
Just like absence of non-reality
Is the same essence anyhow.
Essence is what sunlight is
At the same time that moonlight is,
Both have light, both have shape,
Both have darkness, both are late:
Both are late because empty thereof,
Empty is light, empty is dark,
what’s difference between emptiness
of brightness and dark?
What’s the difference between absence
Of reality, joy, or meaning
In middle of bubble, as being same
As middle of man, non-bubble
Man is the same as man,
The same as no-man, the same
As Anyman, Everyman, Asiman,
(asinine man)
Man is nowhere till he knows,
The essence of emptiness
is essence of gold
106th Chorus
Man is nowhere anyway
Because nowhere is here
And I am here, to testify.
Nowhere is
what nowhere was
I know nowhere
More anywhere
Than this here
Particular everywhere
When I fell thru the eye of the needle
And became a tumbling torso
In the Univers-O,
Brother, let me
tell you,
I thought
I was moving
from somewhere
to everywhere
but nothing moved
so I musta been
and still be
(must) no
where be
But that’s all up to the Saints
I aint gonna say the Saints of Innisfree
107th Chorus
Light is Late
yes
because
it happens after you realize it
You dont see light
Until sensation of seeing light
Is registered in Perception.
Perception notifies Discrimination,
etc., Consciousness
Until then there was no light
So light is late
Darkness is late
You dont conceive of darkness
Till you’ve been late with light
When you learned difference
Between equal poles abright
with Arbitrary ideas
About somethin bein this
Or that, abiding in this abode,
Denying in that abode –
Equal, positive, electric shock,
coil, dacoit, tower,
oil – it’s all late
108th Chorus
Neither this nor that
means,
no arbitrary conceptions,
because if you say
arbitrarily, the RAMMIS
is the RAMMIS, ! –
and the TSORIS is the TSORIS,
or the FLORIST,
or the –
arbitrary conceptions
have sprung into existence
that didnt have to be there
in the first place
when your eyes were bright
with seeing emptiness
in the void of holy sea
where creatures didnt
abound, nor crops grow,
and nothing happened,
and nobody lived,
and nobody cared –
You didnt need
arbitrary concepts there
and need them now
you say you need them now
I say, you say,
Why should you need them now
Why should you now
<
br /> 109th Chorus
“Was it a bright afternoon,
bright with seeing?”
Asks the literary type
sitting in a chair
In an afternoon’s dream
And you see his buddy comin in,
Holding his coat to the hook
After closing the door,
You see it on a Thurber Cartoon,
In New Yorker, the funny
Fat figures V-cut and Z-cut
In squares, spilling cartons
of spaghetti to their orb ball
OON LINE ANOON
POP CLOUD - WORD - HOLE
And people thumb thru
Reg’ally
And up comes the laugh, the yok,
Funny Thurber
Cartoon there,
“Was it a bright afternoon,
bright with seeing?”
looking over his newspaper
or poetry pad
110th Chorus
I know how to withstand poison
And sickness known to man,
In this void. I’m no apprentice
When it comes to remembering
The eternity of suffering
Quietly I’ve been through,
Without complaint, sensing inside
Pain the gloriful um mystery.
Afternoons as a kid I’d listen
to radio programs for to see
the scratch between announcements,
Knowing the invalid is glad
only because he’s mad
enough to appreciate every
little thing that blazons there
in the swarmstorm of his eye
Transcendental Inner Mind
where glorious radiant Howdahs
are being carried by elephants
through groves of flowing milk
past paradises of waterfall
into the valley of bright gems
be rubying an antique ocean
floor of undiscovered splendor
in the heart of unhappiness
111th Chorus
I didnt attain nothin
When I attained Highest
Perfect
Wisdom
Known in Sanskrit as
Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi
I attained absolutely nothing,
Nothing came over me,
nothing was realizable –
In dropping all false conceptions
of anything at all
I even dropped my conception
of highest old wisdom
And turned to the world,
a Buddha inside,
And said nothing.
People asked me questions
about tomatos robbing the vine
and rotting on the vine