Footnotes

90th Chorus

I thought I was a phantom
me, myself,
Suffering. One night I saw
my older brother Gerard
Standing over my crib with wild
hair, as if he had just
pee-visited the pail
in the hall of snores
and headed for his room
was investigatin the Grail,
Nin & Ma's bedroom,
Who slept in the same bed
and in the crib alongside.
Oily is the moment so
that phantom was my brother
only in the sense that cotton
is soft,
Only in the sense that
When you die
you muffle
in your sigh
the thorny hard
regret of rocks
of life-belief.
I knew, I hoped, to go be saved.

from Mexico City Blues by Jack Kerouac, Grove Press, New York, 1990. Copyright 1959 by Jack Kerouac. (text indentation not preserved by blogger.com)

"Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful."

from Manifestoes of Surrealism by Andre Breton: Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, trs. Ann Arbor Paperbacks, University of Michigan Press, 1972, p. 14. Copyright University of Michigan, 1969.