Black

My life is black.

My beret is black.

My apartment is black.

My girlfriend is, well, she's very tan.



Oh, vast blatant train yard of apocalyptic America,

hissing and groaning like a horse on fire with a wick

like gravy in Evanston like stone.



Greasing the abnormal skillet of anti-ardorous desire

dropping dollops in dreamlike cornucopias until nightfall

of concupiscent somnolence 'til the schoolboys know...

and the carnival barkers know.

.. and the legions of lowing lettuce pickers know,

and all those in and out of the "know" know that roaches

are building a motel for us.



America! You're an unfriendly waitress with bad cappuccino.



"I'm in pain," he said.

I said, "I know what you mean."

"No," he said, "I'm in pain."

I said, "I know what you mean."

He said, "No, man, you're standing on my foot."



Come with me now for I feel the tiny teeth of time

on my tremorous testicles like two twin tintypes of

-- I hate it when I get stuck on "t".



Come now and weep sweet elevators of glorious infatuation

niceties, covered like miserable telephones in the

Arizona dawn of cracked brake drums and creaky screen

porches, glowering on the eternal Friday like Ulysses

Grant in a swimsuit rolling his own.

.. like Catholicism, like cool mud,

like some wild sirocco of canvas backdrop nothiningness

in a cucumber sandwich called Suffering. God, that's good.



And in America, when the sun goes down,

and the tide goes out, and the people gather 'round

and they all begin to shout...



When, in resonant sweet shoop alleyways the hyena calls

of drunken Spaniards rattle the glass where I,

in second floor oyster bars,

sit, digging it... where dogs eat dictionaries and

vomit complete sentences. When now,

and now, and now go the clanging departures of cosmos

after cosmos, and we, fired like tiny arrows arc toward

death, I think of Dean Moriarty. I even think of old Dean Moriarty.



I look at where I am, and I know it is time to find

a new... booking agent. (Look at this dump..)