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Sam: You don't like raisins?
Joon: Not really.
Sam: Why?
Joon: They used to be fat and juicy and now they're twisted. They had their lives stolen. Well, they taste sweet, but really they're just humiliated grapes. I can't say I'm a big supporter of the raisin council.
Sam: Did you see those, those raisins on TV? The ones that sing and dance and stuff?
Joon: They scare me.
Sam: Yeah, me too.
Joon: It's sick. The commercial people, they make them sing and dance so people will eat them.
Sam: It's a shame about raisins.
Joon: Cannibals.



Many nights the obvious showed up
at our bedroom door, in its pajamas,
unable to sleep, in need of a hug,
and we just stared at it like an Armenian,
or even worse - hid beneath the covers
and pretended not to hear its tiny sobs.



Well, they are lucky. Let them be
nine-lived and contradictory,
curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat price, which is to die
and die again and again,
each time with no less pain.
A cat minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do. Curiosity

may have killed the cat; more likely
the cat was just unlucky, or else curious
to see what death was like, having no cause
to go on licking paws, or fathering
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.



Once I dated a woman I only liked 43%.
So I only listened to 43% of what she said.
Only told the truth 43% of the time.
And only kissed with 43% of my lips.



In these ways and others you tell on yourself
So there is not a bit of common sense
In trying to keep up a false pretense



I wish that just once,

instead of joyriding over flesh, we'd put our hands away
like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered

the calligraphy of each other's eyelashes, translated
a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn't be said.




I'm sorry all the kisses I scirbbled
on your neck were written in disappearing ink, sorry




And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand -
How few! Yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep - while I weep!
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?



STRANGER: if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?



We don't have a past so much as a bunch
of electricity, power never put to good use



They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there - and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their soul really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.



But Dean's intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, without the tedious intellectualness. And his "criminality" was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long acoming (he only stole cars for joy rides). Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn't care one way or the other...



The expression that says "All Is Well"
--This was what Charlie Parker
Said when he played, All is Well.
You had the feeling of early-in-the-morning
Like a hermit's joy, or like
the perfect cry
Of some wild gang at a jam session
"Wail, Wop" --



...sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words


Beleif & Technique for Modern Prose
List of Essentials
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy
4. Be in love with yr life
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life


...my brother Gerard who said things to me before he died, though I don't remember a word, or maybe I do remember a few (I was only four) --But he said things to me about a reverence for life, no, at least a reverence of the idea of life, which I translated as meaning that life itself is the Holy Ghost--
That we all wander thru flesh, while the dove cries for us, back to the Dove of Heaven--
So I was writing to honor that...


...a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures...



...Japhy and I were kind of outlandish-looking on the campus in our old clothes in fact Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scen - colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.

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