Jack Kerouac — Poems from the Unpublished Book of Blues

"102.3, Poems from the Unpublished "Book of Blues" {Kerouac} "I would like them to play behind me while I'm reading... Can they... Can you hear me while they're playing?" "Yeah" Book of Blues {1st Chorus} I see the backs Of old Men rolling Slowly into black Stores. {2nd Chorus} Line faced mustached Black men with turned back Army weathered brown hats Stomp on by with bags Of burlap and rue Talking to secret Companions with long hair In the sidewalk On 3rd Street San Francisco With the rain of exhaust Plicking in the mist You see in black Store doors— Petting trucks farting— Vastly city. [3rd Chorus] 3rd St Market to Leasе Has a washed down Tile entrancе once white Now caked with gum Of a thousand hundred feet of passers who Did not go straight on Bending to flap the time Pap page on back With smoke emanating From their noses But slowly like old Lantern jawed junkmen Hurrying with the lump Wondrous potato bag To the avenues of sunshine Came, bending to spit, and Shuffled awhile there. [4th Chorus] The rooftop of the beat-up tenement On 3rd & Harrison Has Belfast painted Black on yellow On the side, the old Frisco wood is shown with weatherbeaten rainboards & a washed-out blue bottle once painted for wild commercial reasons by an excited seltzerite as firemen came last afternoon and raised the ladder to a fruitless fire that was not there, so, is Belfast singin' in this time [5th Chorus] when brand's forgotten taste washed in rain the gullies broadened and everybody gone the acrobats of the tenement who dug bel fast divers all and the divers all dove ah little girls make shadows on the sidewalk shorter than the shadow of death in this town— [6th Chorus] Fat girls In red coats With flap white-out shoes Harried Mexican Laborers Become respectable In San Francisco Carrying newspapers Of culture burden And packages of need Walk sadly reluctant To work in dawn Stalking with not cat In the feel of their stride Touching to hide the sidewalk Black shiny last night parlour Shoes hitting the slippery With hard slicky heels To slide & Fall: Breboac! Karrak! [7th Chorus] Dumb kids with thick lip And black skin Carry paper bags Meaninglessly: "Stop bothering the cat!" His mother yelled at him Yesterday and now He goes to work Down Third Street In the milky dawn Piano rolling over the hill To the tune of the English Fifers in some whiter mine, 'Brick a brack, Pliers on your back; Mick mack Kidneys in your back; Bald Boo! Oranges and you! Lick lock The redfaced cock' [8th Chorus] Oi yal! She yawns to lall La la— Me Loom— The weary gray hat Peacoat ex-sailor Manning meekly Hands a poop a pocket Face Lips Oh Mo Sea! The long fat yellow Eternity cream Of the Third St Bus Roof swimming like A monosyllabic Armored Mosasaur Swimming in my Primordial Windowpane Of pain [9th Chorus] Alas! The kid is worried, Pa's astray. What to say To well-dressed ambassadors From death's truth Pimplike, rich, In the morning slick; Or sad white caps Of snowy seamen In San Francisco Gray streets Arm waving to walk The Harrison cross And earn later sunset purple [10th Chorus] Dig the sad old bum No money Presuming to hit the store And buy his cube of oleo For 8 cents So in cheap rooms At AM 3:30 He can cough and groan In a white tile sink By his bed Which is used To run water in And stagger to In the reel of wake up Middle of the night Flophouse Nightmares— His death no blackern' Mine, his Toast's Just as well buttered And on the one side. [11th Chorus] There's no telling What's on the mind Of the bony Character in plaid Workcoat & glasses Carrying lunch Stalking & bouncing Slowly to his job Or the beauteous Indian Girl hurrying stately Into Marathon Grocery Run by Greeks To buy bananas For her love night, What's she thinking? Her lips are like cherries, Her cheeks just purse them out All the more to kiss them And suck their juices out. [12th Chorus] A young woman flees an old man, Mohammedan Prophecy And she got avocados Anyway The furtive girl Looks over her shoulder While unlocking the door Of the tenement Of her man Who with big Negro Arkansas Or East Texas Oilfields Harry Truman hat's Been standing on the street All-day Waiting for the cold girl Bending in thin coat in the wind And Sunday afternoon drizzle To step on it & get some bread For Papa's gotta get some sleep tonite And the Chinaman's coming back [13th Chorus] No hunger & no witties neither deary" Said the crone To Edwin Drood Okay. There'll be an answer. Forthcoming When the morning wind Ceases shaking The man's collar When there's no starch in't And Acme Beer Runs flowing Into dry gray hats. When Dearie The pennies in the palm multiply as you watch [14th Chorus] When whistlers stop scowling Smokers stop sighing Watchers stop looking And women stop walking When gray beards Grow no more And pain don't Take you by surprise And bedposts creak In rhythm not at morn And dry men's bones Are not pushed By angry meaning pelvic Propelled legs of reason To a place you hate, Then I'll go lay my crown Body on the heads of 3 men Hurrying & laughing In the wrong direction, my Idol [15th Chorus] Sex is an automaton Sounding like a machine Thru the stopped up keyhole Young men go faster'n Old men Old men are passionately breathless Young men breathe inwardly Young women & old women Wait There was a sound of slapping When the angel stole come And the angel that had lost Lay back satisfied Hungry addled red face With tight clutch Traditional Time Brief case in his paw Prowls placking the pavement To his office girl's Rumped skirt at 5's Five O Clock Shadows [16th Chorus] Angrily I must insist— The phoney Negro Sea captain With the battered coat Who looks like Charley Chaplin in a movie about now filmed in the air by crews of raving rabid angels drooling happily among the funny fat Cherubim Leading that serious Hardjawed sincere Negro stud In at morn For a round of crimes Is Lucifer the Fraud [17th Chorus] Little girls worry too much For no one will hurt them Except the beast Whom they'd knife In another life In the as well East As West of Bethlehem And do of it much Rhetorical Third Street Grasping at racket Groans and stinky I've no time To dally hassle In your heart's house, It's too gray I'm too cold— I wanta' go to Golden, That's my home. [18th Chorus] I came a weary in From eastern hills; Yonder Nabathacaque recessit The eastward to Aurora rolls, Somewhere West of Idalia Or east of Klamath Falls, One—Lost a blackhaired Woman with thin feet And red bag hanging Who usta walk Down Arapahoe Street In Denver And made all the cabbies cry And drugstore ponies Eating pool in Remsac's Sob, to See so Lovely All the Time And all so Tight And young. [19th Chorus] Pshaw! Paw's Ford Got Lost in the Depression He driv over the Divide And forgot to cleave the road Instead put atomic energy In the ass of his machine And flew to find The gory clouds Of rocky torment Far away And they fished him Outa Miner's Creek More dead n Henry And a whole lot fonder, Podner— Clack of the wheel's My freight train blues Third Street I seed [20th Chorus] And knowed And under ramps I writ The poems of the punk Who met the Fagin Who told him 'Punk When walkin' with me To roll a Sleepin drunk Don't wish ya was back Home in yr mother's parlor And when the cops Come ablastin With loaded 45's Don't ask for gold Or silver from my purse, Its milken hassel Will be strewn And scattered In the sand By an old bean can And dried up kegs We'd a sat & jawed on— [21st Chorus] Roll my bones In the Mortuary My terms And deeds of mortgagry And death and taxes All wrapt up.