Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac Read Free Book Online Page A

paler—Canned whole boiled potatoes like shrunk heads and useless—(that only the deer eat)—the last two cans of Argentine roastbeef, of an original 15, very good, when I arrived in the lookout on that cold storming day with Andy and Marty on the horses I found $30 worth of canned meat and tuna, all good, which in my tightness I’d never have thought to buy—Lumberjack syrup, a big tall can, also a leftover gift, for my delicious flapjacks—Spinach, which, so iron like, never lost its flavor in its seasons on the shelf—My box full of potatoes and onions, O sigh! I wish I had an ice cream soda and a sirloin steak!
    La Vie Parisienne, I picture it, a restaurant in Mexico City, I go in and sit at the rich tablecloth, order good white Bordeaux, and a filet mignon, for dessert pastries and strong coffee and a cigar, Ah, and stroll down the boulevard Reforma to interesting darknesses of the French movie with the Spanish titles and the sudden booming Mexico Newsreel—
    Hozomeen, rock, never eats, never stores up debris, never sighs, never dreams of distant cities, never waits for Fall, never lies, maybe though he dies—Bah.
    Every night I still ask the Lord, “Why?” and havent heard a decent answer yet
    26
    Remembering, remembering, that sweet world SO bitter to taste—the time when I played Sarah Vaughan’s “Our Father” on my little box in Rocky Mount and the colored maid Lula wept in the kitchen so I gave it to her so on Sunday mornings in the meadows and pine barrens of North Carolina now, emerging from her man’s old bare house with the pickaninny porch, you hear the Divine Sarah—“for Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, forever, a men”—the way her voice breaks into a bell on the “a” of amen, quivering, like a voice should—Bitter? because bugs thrash in mortal agony even on the table as you’d think, deathless fools that get up and walk off and are reborn, like us, “hooman beens”—like winged ants, the males, who are cast off by the females and go die, how utterly futile they are the way they climb windowpanes and just fall off when they get to the top, and do it again, till they exhausted die—And the one I saw one afternoon on my shack floor just thrashing and thrashing in the filthy dust from some kind of fatal hopeless seizure—oi, the way we do, whether we can see it now or not—Sweet? just as sweet, tho, as when dinner is bubbling in the pot and my mouth is watering, the marvelous pot of turnip greens, carrots, roast-beef, noodles and spices I made one night and ate barechested on the knoll, sitting crosslegged, in a little bowl, with chopsticks, singing—Then the warm moonlit nights with still the red flare in the west—sweet enough, the breeze, the songs, the dense pine timber down in the valleys of the cracks—A cup of coffee and a cigarette, why zazen? and somewhere men are fighting with frighting carbines, their chests crisscrossed with ammo, their belts weighed down with grenades, thirsty, tired, hungry, scared, insaned—It must be that when the Lord thought forth the world he intended for it to include both me and my sad disinclined pain-heart AND Bull Hubbard rolling on the floor in laughter at the foolishness of men—
    At night at my desk in the shack I see the reflection of myself in the black window, a rugged faced man in a dirty ragged shirt, need-a-shave, frowny, lipped, eyed, haired, nosed, eared, handed, necked, adamsappled, eyebrowed, a reflection just with all behind it the void of 7000000000000 light years of infinite darkness riddled by arbitrary limited-idea light, and yet there’s a twinkle in me eye and I sing bawdy songs about the moon in the alleys of Dublin, about vodka hoy hoy, and then sad Mexico sundown-over-rocks songs about amor, corazón, and tequila—My desk is littered with papers, beautiful to look at thru half