cheers to cirrhosis

[...] On October 21st, 1969, some of Jack Kerouac's stomach veins exploded like those yellow Roman candles he used to talk about. His lifelong heavy drinking lead him to a painful death, however he probably knew how the whisky ways were. Of course I do not know what happened in his house during that last night, nobody knows it really, but I can only hear Stella Kerouac screaming, witnessing how her husband was leaving this world - Kerouac, drowning in a bloodflood at age 47, Kerouac, finding a dead end to his limitless road.

I have always thought that our minds are way too big for our bodies, and that that is the greatest problem an artist has to face. Our heart, a tiny blood box we have to rely on. It stands there, sunk in our chest, and til the final betrayal comes, we usually forget about it, we just wear it like a rhinestone, a piece of scrap whose story we have listened to too many times. Someone next to me is enjoying a whisky glass - my mind drifts to Kerouac's body rebelling against him, his blood vessels bursting, blowing out, I hear his voice calling his wife and his wife rushing him to the hospital and thinking how far away are now the careless warm nights on the road, in a synthetic place - a hospital where hope is pricey, with people coming out from aproximately thirty wombs everynight and aproximately thirty people getting into the earth's womb every morning.

I think about Kerouac's forehead, decked in morning dew, his lips slightly open, his saliva still liquory. There seems to be a strong relation between poets and self-destruction, between pain and the ability of seeing beyond. Hunter S. Thompson killed himself while listening to Mr. Tambourine Man, by Bob Dylan, and now everytime that song makes its way to me I know he is listening, and the lyrics are soggy with his loins, he is there.

Life is the greatest masterpiece, the mind is the universe, but our body is limited and an unreliable partner in crime.
It is easy to get lost, it takes twenty seconds and a fool to do it. That is why becoming a seer is crucial. We need to survive in order to see beyond. Between all these corpses there is a way, but do not you expect it to be paved in yellow cobblestone . A poet is a wisdom robber, but somehow, somewhere Mr. Tambourine Man keeps on playing [...]

© written by VICTORIA BARDOT, all rights reserved
© image: Jack Kerouac by Tom Palumbo