Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac Read Free Book Online

west wind picks up, comes from smileless wests, invisible, and sends clean messages thru my cracks and screens—More, more, let the firs wither, more, I want to see the white marvels south—
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    Noumena is what you see with your eyes closed, that immaterial golden ash, Ta the Golden Angel—Phenomena is what you see with your eyes open, in my case the debris of one thousand hours of the living-conception in a mountain shack—There, on top of the woodpile, a discarded cowboy book, ugh, awful, it is full of sentimentality and long-winded comments, silly dialog, sixteen heroes with double guns to one ineffectual villain whom I’d rather like for his irascibility and clomping boots—the only book that I have thrown away—Above it, sitting on corner of window, a can of Macmillan Ring Free Oil that I use to keep my kerosene in and to stoke fires, to fire fires, wizard like, vast dull explosions in my stove that get the coffee boiling—My frying pan hangs from a nail over another (castiron) pan too big to use but my used pan keeps dripping dribbles of fat down its back reminds of streamers of sperm, that I scrape off and flut into the wood, who cares—Then the old stove with the water pan, the perpetual coffee potpan with long handle, the tea pot seldom used—Then on a little table the great greasy dishpan with its surroundant accoutrements of steel scrubber, rags, stove rags, washwhirl stick, one mess, with a perpetual puddle of black scummy water under it that I wipe out once a week—Then the shelf of canned goods diminishing slowly, and other foods, Tide soap box with the pretty housewife holding up a Tide box saying “Just made for each other”—Box of Bisquick left here by the other lookout I never opened, jar of syrup I dont like—give to an ant colony down the yard—old jar of peanutbutter left here by some lookout presumably when Truman was President apparently from the old peanut rot of it—Jar I keep pickled onions in, that turns to smell like hard cider as the afternoon sun works it, to rancid wine—little bottle of Kitchen Bouquet gravy juice, good in stews, awful to wash off your fingers—Box of Chef Boyardee’s Spaghetti Dinner, what a joyous name, I picture the Queen Mary docked in New York and Chefs going out to hit the town with little berets, towards the sparkling lights, or else I picture some sham chef with mustachio singin Italian arias in the kitchen on television cook shows—Pile of enveloped green pea powder soup, good with bacon, good as the Waldorf-Astoria and that Jarry Wagner first introduced me to that time we hiked and camped at Potrero Meadows and he dumped frying bacon into the whole soup pot and it was thick and rich in the smoky night air by the creek—Then a half-used cellophane bag of blackeyed peas, and a bag of Rye Flour for my muffins and to glue together Johnny-cakes—Then a jar of pickles left in 1952 and froze in the winter so that the pickles are just spicy water husks looking like Mexican greenpeppers in a jar—My box of cornmeal, unopened can of Calumet Baking Powder with the full-headed Chief—new unopened can of black pepper—Boxes of Lipton soup left by Ole Ed the previous lonely fucker up here—Then my jar of pickled beets, ruby dark and red with a few choice onions whitening against the glass—then my jar of honey, half gone, for hot-milk-and-honey on cold nights when I feel bad or sick—Unopened can of Maxwell House coffee, the last one—Jar of red wine vinegar I’ll never use and which I wish was wine and looks like wine so red and deep—Behind that, new jar of molasses, that I drink from the bottle sometimes, mouthfuls of iron—The box of Ry-Krisp, which is dry sad concentrated bread for dry sad mountains—And a row of cans left years ago, with frozen and dehydrated asparagrass that is so ephemeral to eat it’s like sucking water, and