well world, have your way with my death

dear kerouac
as you stone on your mountain hozomeen
my eyes incant to a passing freight
olive cars rocking through an Illinois alley
dear jack
I see no animals in my window
only faces/the mythology
we never heard
before this tuesday in 1974
your spirit rises in the abnormal may fog
and those pleasure-dreams of the
streets you crashed in my adolesence
pass me in a kind of buddha-death

it is too late to love you
your eyes are closed
I give up my eyes for you kerouac
at least you are dead and have no fear
left your special non-specific words
like paint spilled in my drive

In the early seventies I spent a certain amount of my energy meditating on my own death. It was a leftover from being raised roman catholic. And it had that weird intersection with the beats, who were sort of truly informed on the notion of death as a step on the wheel of conception. Kerouac's poem, the quivering meat wheel of conception, held a fairly constant place in my conscious being. I feared my death, more from the loss of the flesh than from the loss of the indivudated soul. In those days I kind of hoped the soul was not individuated and that dying would allow me to join in the great Marriage. I now now that both of these things are the shape of the next world and that one cannon escape one's self and should not escape one's self. But, hey, I was young.