Borders are the gallows
Of our collective egos
Subjective, lines in sand
In the water, seperating everything
Fear is the cause of seperation
Backed with illicit conversations
Procured by constant condemnations
National blood painted persuasions
Here's my song for the free
No, it's not about praise and publicity
Coprotocracy, what a hypocricy
Aristocracy verses democracy
Fear is the cause of seperation
Backed with illicit conversations
Procured by constant condemnations
National blood-painted persuasions
The king is dead and now
We're dancing in the streets
As the waters rise
We're merely covering our feet
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
Fear is the cause of seperation
Backed with illicit condemnations
National blood-painted persuasions
Tear is the cause of seperation
Backed with illicit conversations
Procured by constant condemnations
National bloo-painted persuasions
The king is dead, and now we're dancing in the streets
As the waters rise, we're merely covering our feet
Your gods are dead and now we're dancing in the streets
As the waters rise we're merely covering in defeat
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
Never let you go
Never let you go
Never let you go
Never let you go
' the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirious of everything at the same time the one's wo never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars in the middle you see the bluecenter light pop and everything goes Awww!' - Jack Kerouac.
Today is the birthday of visionary, iconclastic writer and poet, Jack Kerouac. The shaman of the Beat Generation . Born 12/3/22 of a French-Canadian family in the factory town of Lowel, Mass, U.S.A.
Variously called the Beat Generations apostle, poet, hero, laureate, saint? Through his own life story he created a work of fiction .Soared so high, that in the end unfortunately found his own human skin, then found himself out of his depth in bottled delusion, where the burning ship had become his own.
In his life, he had been part of a culture and people , who burned like meteors. Jack Kerouac was the Beat Generations very own mythologiser, he and his band of brothers helped redeem a bit of America's soul. His legacy, like that of the Beat Culture, still alive, still relevant, still taking root.
Along with his friends, Corso, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Ferllinghetti etc, he paved a way for a whole host of dreamers searching for risk, some form of adventure. Colouring our worlds with their crazy visions, their minds in revolt, searching for future's possibilities. Hand in hand with rebellion, against the conventions of the times.
Jack Kerouac in his eighteen books and many others under Jack's influence were to me important epiphanies on my own path of self discovery. He taught me about "Spontaneous prose." - writing without revising....... He called this " a spontaneous bop prosody." which is a bit like a jazz musician taking an improvised solo, and taking it as far as he could go, no editing , no pause of breath. Sometimes what is left, has no meaning, a void, but often their is a glimmer, that spells hope, that can become endless, can run off the page, infinite but accessible.
On my bookshelf at home Keroucs influence groans on my bookcases, his own works, sharing spaces with others , that were touched by his inspiration.
Their is something about his tragic, magic life that still resonates, hums, their will always be new connections, outhouses where seeds will forever drift. New poets will emerge, try to experience, the whole wide world, and words will dance, impulsively between time, forever and forever. Some might go out to the garden and pick lunch. Enthusiasims will be shared, thougyhs will be exchanged, and for some the personal will always be political. Passion will ignite. Jack was not immortal, though for me his words are, he left this planet on October 21 1969, 47 years , his search for inner lamentation cut tragically short. Still yearning for his mother, but lost in a catholic guilt, that had always consumed him. Stuck in sad exile, his mystical breath had grown tired , what was once beautiful had begun to drift towards bitterness.
So happy birthday Jack.....your impact continues to be felt....satori breath ... om switchin on.... tomorrow's dawns chorus echoes, anethetizing the sky.... sentences littered with wild perception, language as a spell that leaves us forever hooked. In human existence our contradictions will abound, freeze framed, on the road to nowhere. Kicks joy darkness.
William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, 1953
Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Kerouac,
Greeenwich Village, 1957.
Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen show 1958.
A freewheeling Kerouac
interviewed by Fernando Pirano
Kerouac: The movie (1985)
Their are numerous pages and books devoted to Kerouac and the Beats , if you look you will find what your looking for, the searching is part of the journey.Here's a wikilink, better than nothing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_kerouac andsome of his poetry
POOR SOTTISH KEROUAC
Poor sottish Kerouac with his thumb in his eye
Getting interested in literature again
Through a mote of dust just flew by
How should I know that the dead were born?
Does Master cry?
The weeds Ophelia wound with
and Chatterton measured in the moon
are the weeds of Goethe, Wang Wei,
and the Golden Courtesans
Imagining recommending a prefecture
for a man in the madhouse
rain
Sleep well, my angel
Make some eggs
The house in the moor
The house is a monument
In the moor of the grave
Whatever that means
The white dove descended in disguise?
WOMAN
A woman is beautiful
but
you have to swing
and swing and swing
and swing like
a hankerchief in the
wind
149th Chorus
I keep falling in love
with my mother
I dont want to hurt her
=Of all people to hurt
Every time I see her
she's grown older
But her uniform always
amazes me
For its Dutch simplicity
And the Doll she is.
The doll-like way
she stands
Bowlegged in my dreams,
Waiting to serve me
And I am only an Apache
Smoking Hashi
In old Cabashy
By the Lamp
2111th Chorus
The wheel of the quivering meat
conception
Turns in the Void expelling human beings,
Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits,
Mice, Lice, Lizards, rats, roan
Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics,
Horrible unnameable lice of vultures
Murderous attacking dog-armies
Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the jungle
Vast boars and huge gigantic bull
Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,
Pones and Porcupines and Pills-
All the endless conception of living
beings
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in and out,
From supermicroscopic no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one mind
AND THEN THEY GOT HIM
The Oil of the Olive
Bittersweet taffies
Bittersweet cabbage
Cabbage soup made right
A hunk a grass
In a big barrel
Stunk but Good
163rd Chorus
Left the Tombs to go
and look at the
Millions of cut glass-
-a guy clocking them,
as you look you sawllow,
you get so fat
you can't leave the building
-stand straight,
don't tip over, breathe
in such a way yr fatness
deflates, go back to
the Tombs,
ride the elevator-
he tips over again'
gazes on the Lights,
eats them, is clocked,
gets so fat
he can leave elevator,
has to stand straight
and breathe out the fat -
-hurry back to the Tombs
242nd Chorus
The sound in your mind
is the first sound
that you could sing
If you were singing
at a cash register
with nothing on yr mind-
But when that grim reper
comes to lay you
look out my lady
He will steal all you got
while you dingle with the dangle
and having robbed you
Vanish
Which will be your best reward,
T'were better to get rid o
John O'Twill, then sit a mortying
In this Half Eternity with nobody
To save the old man being hanged
In my closet for nothing
And everybody watches
When the act is done-
Stop the murder and the suicide!
All's well!
I am the Guard
Where man has not been to give them names objects on desert islands do not know what they are. Taking no chances they stand still and wait quietly excited for hundreds of thousands of years.
Alone
If you are mortar it is hard to feel well-disposed towards the two bricks you are squashed between or even a sense of community. Ivor Cutler's kitchen domain.
Poems reprinted from A Flat Man Trigram Press 1977.
As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for - but we fight for roses, too!
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more drudge and idler - ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses.
The above poem written by James Mc Millan was written to celebrate the movement for women's rights and was first published in American Magazine in 1911, and is closely associated with the Lawrence Textile mill strike of 1911, where the above picture was taken. During this strike, which was in protest of a reduction in pay, under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World ( The Wobblies) and led primarily by the women workforce, the women mill workers carried signs that quoted the poem, reading 'we want bread and roses too.' It has since become an anthem for labor rights, and especially the rights of working women, across the globe.
' . . . life demands that the duality in men and women be freed to function, released from hate or guilt. All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion; subjection excludes mutality. Only through this duality in each can a man and a woman have empathy for each other. The best lovers are men who can imagine and even feel the specific pleasures of women; women who know the passions and vulnerabilities of the penis - triumphant or tender - in themselves. Without empathy, men and women, husbands and wives, become tools of each other: competitors, rivals, master and slave, buyer and seller. In this war the aggressions of the wholly ' feminine' woman are just as destructive (mostly to the male) as the aggressions of the wholly 'masculine' man. For centuries the need to prove this image of masculanity has lain at the root of death: the killing of self and others in the wars of competition and conquest; the perversion of humanity itself. We need each other's qualities if we are to understand each other in love amnd life. The beautiful difference of our biological selves will not diminish through this mutual fusion. It should indeed flower, expand; blow the mind as well as the flesh. When women can cherish the vulnerability of men as much as men can exult in the strength of women, anew breed could lift a ruinous yoke from both. We could both breathe free.
