Giant's Blood
"In my medicine cabinet
the winter fly
Has died of old age" ~Jack Kerouac
Alone
the tired giant sat
looking at America;
no light but Edison's stars,
no song but subways' caterwaul
in the emptiness of time
that made him small.
Bored
he decided America
was constipated. He invented
a purgative of darkness and fireworks,
administered every night,
and in his ennui
took most of it himself.
Restless
he rolled, up and
down
the endless ribbon that was
two thirds the
mark of the beast,
til the road ran him down
and went on, its
pockets full.
Dying
he covered the
spliced paper continuum
til the page flapped out. He saw
the medicine he'd swallowed
was his own black blood,
while America
was just exactly
what it seemed.
April 2020
posted for
hosted by the inimitable Fireblossom
Process Notes: Kerouac's great novel On The Road was written in one continuous burst. "Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper into long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together
into a 120-foot-long roll which he then fed into the machine.
This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of
reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or
paragraph breaks...
..On the morning of October 20, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida,
Kerouac was working on a book about his father's print shop. He
suddenly felt nauseated and ..began to
vomit blood. Kerouac was taken to St. Anthony's Hospital,
suffering from an esophageal hemorrhage...He..died at the hospital at 5:15 the following morning, at the age of 47.
His cause of death was listed as an internal hemorrhage..caused by cirrhosis, the result of longtime alcohol abuse." ~ wikipedia
Images via internet, authors unknown. Fair Use
