perhaps it's the color of the sun cut flat and covering
the crossroads I'm standing at
or maybe it's the weather of something like that
but mama, you been on my mind

"But you're only sixteen years old, you're younger than me, I'm seventeen--" She brooded and bit her rich lips: my soul began its first sink into her, deep, heady, lost; like drowning in a witches' brew, Keltic, sorcerous, starlike.

Jack Kerouac wrote that

“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”

Bobby Dylan wrote that

I've bean

reading two books by Jack Kerouac (simultaneously on accident, by the time I lost and found the subterraneans I had gotten just as far in Maggie Cassidy.)

it's all in love with the world, probably benzedrine-influenced poetic detail that I have really come to enjoy. I tend to read and re-read the words in both books, in their separate styles. making me crave the nighttime and the flats and laughs and drinks and the surreal melancholy of being up in the negative pink light of sunrise. I cannot begin to describe the ideas that surround the feeling.

these poets are good and different like I like them. beautiful diction in precise order for the hell of it, because it sounds good and picturesque like I like it.

various scraps of song lyrics:

Black valley, peace beneath the city
Where the white girls wander the strip mall, singing all day
“Give me a juggernaut heart and a Japanese car and someone to free"


In the summer all the lights would shine there'd be music playin' people laughin' all the time
Me and my sister we'd hide out in the tall corn fields
Sit and listen to the mansion on the hill


and Kerouac, in Maggie Cassidy:

"And once again, everything else exhausted for the while, he sang Jack o diamonds in that way he'd just learned, sad, incredibly sad like a dog act, or like men singing, floating broken and prophetic in the snow of the night, Jack o diamonds, as arm in arm they all scuffled into the New Year's Eve dance at the Rex Ballroom, their first dance each one, their first and last future before them."

1. flats

took a drive to the sprawl to find the house where we used to stay

couldn't read the number in the dark- you said let's save it for another day

took a drive into the sprawl to find the places we used to play

it was the loneliest day of my life, you're talking at me but I'm still far away

let's take a drive through the sprawl, to these towns they built to change

it was then you said the emotions are dead- it's no wonder that you feel so strange

cops showing their lights on the reflectors of our bikes

said "do you kids know what time it is?"

well, sir, it's the first time I felt like something is mine,

that I have something to give

the last defender of the sprawl said "where do you kids live?"

well, sir, if you only knew what the answer is worth,

been searching every corner of the earth

2. mountains beyond mountains

they heard me singing and they told me to stop
quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
these days my life I feel it has no purpose
but late at night the feelings swim to the surface
cause on the surface the city lights shine
they're calling at me come and find your kind
sometimes I wonder if the world's so small
that we can never get away from the sprawl

living in the sprawl
dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
and there's no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights

we rode our bikes to the nearest park
sat under swings and kissed in the dark
we shield our eyes from the police lights
we run away, but we don't know why
and like a mirror, the city lights shine
screaming at us "we don't need your kind"
sometimes I wonder if the world's so small
that we can never get away from the sprawl

living in the sprawl

dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains

and there's no end in sight

I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights