'Got Jack In My Pocket' - Excerpt From Slim Noir's Memoir Of Yoot (On Occasion Of Jack Kerouac's Birthday 3/12/1922) Poem by Warren Falcon

It has been found again!

What?

Eternity.

It is the sea mingled with the sun. - Artur Rimbaud


In the valley of Saint Elmo I circumambulated, not a stupa in sight but, yes, myopic stuporous there-there, the massive Crosses-pocked cemetery where Tennessee Ave and Lookout Mountain Highway jerked apart, severed, rather, perseverated, and/but but/and I had Jack in my pocket to read among the plots, his many providing accompanying rhythm as I winding went.

Just what I needed then.

Kerouac saved what was left of my sanity while plummeting out of fundamentalist Christianity, self-exiled from the dread Presby-tistas of Lookout Mountain 'pon yon John Calvin's cringing hill.

There were other writers too but Kerouac loomed and looms (as in weaves) still, vital to my coming down from the unraveling yarn of Reformation Mountain, the red bricked Lowell-like smudge-neckt rejoinder of Chattanooga, human all too human, greasy smog-smear, yes, but was sufficient enough to blink much and stutter stagger eventually away from a riven chapter of my life coming, or so I then thought, to an end, and/but Chat-town, Saint Elmo's clubbed foot edge-bottomed playing footsies with the Inclination to See Seven States (of Mind, Hell, Heaven) from Summit, a still collective tendency of bother-to-Ascension promises of future inherited mansions imperpetuituous tsk tsk, twas and still tis, has to be, part of personal history, self as blister more than enough.

*

'Hi there Tex, what you say
Step aside partner, it's my day
Bend an ear and listen to my version
(Of a really solid, Tennessee excursion) '
- opening lyric from 'Chattanooga Choo Choo

I took comfort tho in knowing Ismael Reed was from Chattanooga, Bessie Smith too, even Glenn Miller's joyous Choo Choo brought some joy pointing me soon enough avast away to Thomas Wolfe's town, Asheville, where the new chapter really began, Wolfe, of course, being young Jack's literary hero, upon whose porch I'd often swing after an almost-midnight bad cup of coffee in hand, SHONEYS BIG BOY excretions all the blander by the free pot-fulls proffered over an almost floating definitely hallucinatory slice of famed strawberry pie glopped 10 chinlinks below one's own for the tasting; in the other hand a book, Jack's or Wolfe's, to gander just before I'd clock in some blocks away at the psych hospital for all night shifts on the locked unit where I could read most of the night as patients neurochemically slept bludgeoned, it was and now still hoped, into normailty's promised, o ye good citizens, golden oblivion-with-benefits, depending on the state and region, an earnestly rumored extended sanity unfurling without end, BUT

Jack says it all better, could, did, but I bow to him and try, stick a pickle in my eye, wink wink, this for Jack:

On with the boring

center line endlessly

dividing though broken

on purpose suggesting

a way to veer.


No guide needed here.

Fear is the drive shaft,

and longing turns the wheel.