WORDS LIKE WILD HORSES
An homage to Jack Kerouac
by William Thomas
Sometime in the early hours around oh-dark-thirty, when farm and forest are silent and unglimpsed creatures prowl the night, my day’s delving into the blowback and pain from a plundered planet kicks loose the doorstop of denial wedged against a yawing entryway to imminent and implacable realities from which there is no going back...
Creeeeeak!!! The door swings open and somewhere behind eyes burning like coals from another 14 hours staring down the endlessly scrolling windows of a computer screen something lets go and all the words I’ve been so careful to corral and control for public presumption escape like wild horses, trampling the genetically modified wheat.. galloping over fences… heading for higher ground.
Jack Kerouac was the first to surf book-length stream-of-consciousness narrative to a jazz beat. That freight-hopping Dharma bum used to sit on borrowed couches winding hundred twenty-foot rolls of teletype paper through his typewriter like ammo belts before taking another gulp of rotgut wine and lettin’ ‘er rip — the muse I mean, insistent, wicked and wise as an honest drunk, funneling through the most devoted scribes whatever comes lunging or slithering through that doorway... onto unscrolling yards of black ink screed:
tap tap tappety tap - ka-ching! - tap tap tap
... leaning into the sheer mad joy of kickwriting —
single-spaced, no paragraph breaks...
Far away from home in a strange, cheap, all too familiar hotel room — hiss of the steam radiator, groan of old framing under footsteps coming upstairs — all the sad sounds of this too-huge world... No worries, no counting the miles, no thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas...
The only hope for surcease if not salvation is to keep going as this never-ending night of American improv deepens and that jug of cheap wine runs out and the last drags on the last smoke tease nicotine-starved lungs. Chapters spill onto the floor like tickertape… insights, impressions and imprecations recklessly relentlessly filling pages without indents or punctuation to catch each fleeting synapse on the fly — more like film frames than text.
Only it’s hard to tell how this movie ends or even where it’s going.. which is somehow the point expressing such outraged anguish over all the slaughtered innocents — and every kiss and kindness too spilling onto the page under a single unshaded bulb. Like the light in monks’ cells. And interrogation rooms.
Total Zen, baby! Rolling in all the way from China and post-atomic Japan to break like surf over San Francisco shores, shocking every nodding hep daddy and even the cooolest cats with the irradiated Orient’s incredible implacable impossible exhortation to fetch wood, carry water — that’s all!
It sounds so simple being totally present — engaged yet unattached to outcomes too mortal and mysterious to worry about now or ever — yet a place difficult to attain, except during a few seconds’ stark awareness prodded by sleep deprivation, nicotine, alcohol… and another caffeine overdose. The basic gig basically demands full immersion in each fleeting moment RIGHT NOW!
Which is why Kerouac’s and my fingers flew/fly over keys tap taptap tapping like those rebounding ivories tinkling daringly discordant bars from a ‘78 spinnin’ round ‘n’ round like a koan through all that bare bulb haze until Kerouac’s clatter and my own finally fall away.. into the kind of speechlessness that comes after wild sex… Or violent sunsets cast by an unknown star.
Winding the platten… opening a fresh doc, Jack and me inhale any messages that might have come through, surprised and humbled as any explorer when all that purposeful pounding — day after week after month for most of a lifetime — reveals a few more secrets in all those lines of code.
Keep going as the first hint of light ghosts the west coast sky and the boundary between dream and reality blurs dissolves like the illusion it’s always been, only we’ve forgotten ever since we traded in shamans and three-million years of wandering and wondering for lockstep wristwatch prisons — and let go of everything joyful spontaneous and wise.
Dig it! the Beats insisted. Drink the dregs and pluck the muse’s cocked-leg invitation from the bottom of the jug: Keep typing. Keep going. Ya’ll want rev’lations jest be sure yer ready! Nowhere to go but ever’where, so jes’ keep on rollin’... down the holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road... any road... Screw sitting still counting breaths the universe is breathing you. There is no time.
No
Time
The fleet is steaming beneath the Golden Gate again and again and again, replaying in flickering newsreel nightmare their paradoxical passage west to the East where Fermi’s illegitimate suns rose like double stars over what is now the Land of the Rising Suns. If you meet the Buddha on the road nuke the bastard! (Yessir, sed the robot men.)
Go ahead b r e a t h e cry scream r o a r Jack roared over twin atomic field test atrocities that contaminated a vengeful nation and all the centuries to come. Good thing Jack can’t see all those kids with monstrous heads and twisted stub limbs from all that Depleted Uranium dust raining down on endless undefended villages and Puerto Rican shooting ranges by the same terrorists hiding under the same false flag pretensions: USA! USA! USA!
Hear him now, tap tap tapping to fill us in with a postcard from the Other Side: It’s kinda nice here with all these virgins, free-range honey, Jesus and all — but I miss embodiment and hot nights typing to hotter jazz and the taste of a real nipple in my mouth — whatever it takes to drown the screams of the maimed and traumatized in too many unpronounceable places where people are just trying to live — not to mention denying all those kids to come any chance of happiness or hope.
Swaying on the brink of mortality’s last high dive what can Jack and the rest of us mad scribblers do but try to chivvy an ancient alphabet’s couple dozen letters into fresh configurations perhaps conjuring that wildcard Rune foretelling your last great misfortune: “You are going to die soon. Have a great day."
You gotta be careful playing with explosive words. Touch the red wire and the next wake up is pow now — or never — as synapses spark snap sizzle smoke in burnout or disclosure, whichever comes first as each rollicking raucous riff raises random juxtapositions too accurate to be coincidental but just possibly profound. Who the hell knows? You decide. Forget the fakery of words like maps pretending to be what they describe. Read aloud instead to whoever will listen:
It’s all about vibration. Seek… silence….. Slooooooow… dow….n. Give that judgment cop programmed into yer addled skull some gingersnaps and a cuppa, say go sit by that guy over there hunkered on crossed legs with his hands folded over his big belly —the dude with the all-knowing grin on his face. See if anything… rubs off.
If you don’t shut up the good stuff can’t come through. And you won’t let go all those meaningless meanings to catch their humming frequencies instead — familiar and insistent as drumbeats heard on a trimaran’s deck in the thrumming Tongan night: words cries whispers beating beating beating in some primal pulse beyond the dizzying spin of too many ads, too many lies, too much bad news — all to keep our mental monkeys chattering.. so the Big Connections are never made.
“All of life is a foreign country,” Jack sed. Like ‘murika seen through the eyes of its foundered fathers. They must be thinking Goebbels would be envious of rhetoric repeated by wet-mouthed media whores until lies become “alternative facts” while the truth stays hidden.More children dying more parents crying under our never-ending legacy of bombs always more bombs and all those indiscriminate hellfire robot drones as the glaciers melt and the world burns.
Forget words. Listen always and rather for the reconnecting resonance lost in the din of distractions arranged by virtual reality virtuosos bent on controlling everything and everyone but themselves.
Everyone is so afraid of their own ghosts, why don’t we turn off our own projections so we can unplug all the other ones too? Switch off your vehicle’s ignition and all media mesmerizers. Park your carbon burner immediately chain it to a post and in memory of the good doctor and whatever went down at Woody Creek whip out yer .45 — shout “For Hunter!” — and put a round right through the engine block. Save the 12-gauge for the TeeVee. And one more thing:
Stop buying so much crap!
Whether excreted by corporations or politicians, it’s all the same thing. Yer beginning to get it now. Like Jack said or meant to say, slip through reality’s kicked open doorway an’ oops! there’s no going back, no chance of divorcing terrestrial and oceanic kin a hundred generations hence, no way to return to the arrogance of ignorance and denial masquerading as belief.
Who sez they “can’t be bothered” when the tramp of jackboots stops outside their door? The liberty and freedom bombers are swooping towards someone’s neighborhood again, where no one can shoot back. But Jack and I are rolling in synch now like a tractor-trailer descending Rogers Pass at dawn, engine howling against compression, surrounding summits turning pink and that black tunnel mouth filling the windscreen looking way too small. Too late to stop. I glimpse one scorched wall where some shocked joker’s unbraked trailer tried to pass him — 53-foot box looming like a Great White in his mirrors. That driver got out alive but none of us will, not when we enter that last dark tunnel going too fast… or not really moving at all.
Which is why we gotta hit it now Jack! There is only now Jack. Behind the tigerish embers of our burning eyes the gathering dawn of another day brings one more chance to get it right — if only for a heartbeat, a few hot tears or a lunatic’s grin — all these words jostling and pushing like wild horses for the light and the freedom that is the one true legacy of being human and alive.
Photo Captions
Stampeding wild horses -wallpaper-house.com
Jack Kerouac checks the day's take -cultweb.it/cultura
Kerouac girl Alen Alee
On The Road -scroll.in
Kerouac autograph -jackkerouac.com