Poems from the Unpublished “Book of Blues”

"102.3, Poems from the Unpublished "Book of Blues"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.