Ode to Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was barefoot when he typed in his second story apartment on the edge of Mexico City. The humidity haunted the border of his room, the window, the garden outside, the moon in the sky, the clouds passing through time on the way from the fifties to the sixties and beyond. Dogs ran wild in the streets as the sons and daughters of those dogs run wild some fifty years later. Bolero music from the dance hall down the dirt street rolled in his window casually, dreamily aiding our hero in his mission. He wasn’t capturing the time, nor defining his experience any more than Miles Davis defines a Dorian scale as that pattern or series of notes defined by a certain half step/whole step intervallic regularity. Kerouac, rather, typed like a pianist improvises at the piano, his words pouring fourth without editing or creative criticism. This was his tribute and his song cycle.