Book of Sketches - Jack Kerouac [43]
city flowing in by thousandmoth
waves — The
silence of Mardou’s
clothes, the water bottle,
rumpled bed — face
American goofing in
sheets — little sweet
sad radio — Love
shoulders of Mardou
Little tree & bush buds on
the screen outside — some
are dead little dry ravelled
quiverers in a dry void —
some almost that way
but still organically
vine likely tangled by strings
of green life to the twig
bough of the bush & will
receive their comedownance
come October soon —
some still green & juicy
lifed, twirled lifelikely
around on a yellow
Lonestem to droop in
the August sorrow of
peace & gas fumes from
hiway — some twig
ends are so small almost
unseeable & bear nothing
but dead leaves who not
only sucked it dry but
had taken a chance &
pitched a mansion of
life there but father-
twig missed, castrated,
cancered out & done
did die so now it’s a
pale Indian sticklet
with rorfled dood
leaves bup to dooded
no-life & shake to
quiver of earth on a
general bush bearing
no relation to world
— insignificant, skinny
as sticks in graves —
the big healthy deep
green leaves have et
up all the juice of the
bush, they spring from
elastic stems straight
from the gnarly roothowa’d
bough bone of
the bush-proper &
shake to the wind with
heavy weight & thru
then see the pale
day light in veins
absorbed to suck
blushing phosphor greens
like chlorophyll
— the one recently
stillgreen deadleave
dangling on a broken stem —
East River
The old blackgarbed
watcher of cities sitting
on the Live Oak Jim
NewYork barge in the
dry cool afternoon —
watching tugs warp in
finished excursion boats, river
tankers, barges pass —
his interest in the river,
the names of Tug Captains
& Excursion Steamer deck-
hands, the arrival &
departure of great
ocean going orange masted
like the Waterman
Liberty today docked
at Jack Frost Sugars
across the river in L I City
— This old guy, with
whitefringe hair around
baldspot but wearing his
black soothat, sits on
the bit on the swaying barge,
smoking, — to him the
city & the world is such
a different thing as it is
just across the Drive in
Bellevue Hospital where
in density of world interest
now gloomy psychiatrists
consult with patients &
aint interested in the sun
on the river, the free
gulls floating in the
sleepy tide, the
gay littleboats,
but in problems of
marriage & emotional adjustment
& all such dark,
gloomy, indoor preoccupations
& with such contempt for
those like those on the
river who dont interiorate
with them in this Byzantine
Vault of Mind Horror —
the walls of Bellevue,
dirty rosebrick grim beneath
shining purities of clearday
heaven, the ink of
the windows, the soot
darkness of the bars in
the windows, the formidable
mass & camp
& hangup of the
great structure — & only
beyond, above the white
clean modernisms of a
new bldg. N.Y.U. Medical
Science bldg. there rises
the screwpoint phallus
Empire State Building with
his new TV French
tickler on the end,
clouds of lost hope,
sweet, impossible, pass
behind it high, there
the interests of millionaire
corporations high above
the tangled human streets
— old Live Oak Jim
aint interested in but just
the river & that
Lehigh Valley barge
with the 2 cuts of cars
being loaded, meeting of
railroad & seawater rail
to railpoint in the
actual workingman
afternoon of the real
world — And yet
above all, the mystery,
Live Oak Jim really is
an old ex Bellevue
mental patient, flipped
in ’33, knows it well,
has his back to it now
in studies of his river,
— now’s inside napping,
his brother is a lawyer
in the Empire State Bldg.
Black Tanker
Gloomy black tanker
being tugged in, the gray
superstructure as tho they
hadnt in 10 years yet
scraped the war paint
camouflage off, the
blue stack with white
“T” — the black
sinister hull, — “Michael
Tracy” — deck gang
chipping hatch covers
upstood — stewards
huddled at stern in
idiot white, watching
waters — “I’m
gonna git drunk
tonight!” In from
Persian