Two Flies Fucking On Jack Kerouac's Forehead

Two flies fucking on Jack Kerouac’s forehead. As he lay sleeping. In a book. In a haiku. Penned by Jack Kerouac. Awakened by the tickle of two flies fucking on his forehead. And I remember the fly buzzing around Jack Elam at the beginning of Once Upon A Time In The West. Fly crawls around his mouth but he chooses not to swat it, just tries blowing it off of his lip, taking in air carefully so as not to take the fly in too, then blow. Doesn’t work. Fly lands elsewhere, window frame. Elam catches it with his gun barrel. Einstein says thought is muscular. He liked to imagine how his body would feel in such & such an imaginary situation, considering that certain physical laws were true. For example, how would it feel to ride a horse on a beam of light? Can’t believe my right heel still hurts when I first put weight on it. It’s been six months now. Achilles tendinopathy, according to Dr. Google. Pain goes away once I begin walking on it. Stopped a while to talk to the man who’s been clearing the brush on the vacant lot off Highland. House used to be there. He helped dismantle it, 35 years ago. He was pouring sweat. Sawed tree limbs by hand. Too risky to use a chainsaw. Finished Hell on Wheels, story about the first transcontinental railroads meeting in Promontory, Utah. Ran five seasons on AMC, now on Netflix. Anson Mount played Cullen Bohannon, a former Confederate soldier out to avenge the murderous deaths of his wife & son by Union soldiers. He’s a grim-faced, hawk-eyed, laconic man who seems driven by deeper energies than revenge, & whose deadly skill with a long-barreled Griswold seems almost preternatural, an engine of predestination. The series begins with Bohannon murdering a man in a confession box & ends with him returning to the same confession box years later after the Central Pacific & Union Pacific have joined & the scoundrel businessman Thomas Durant (Colm Meaney) pounds the golden spike in. The priest enters the confession box & offers comfort & encourages Bohannon to speak, but Bohannon is overwhelmed by emotion & cannot speak; he breaks down crying. In the final scene of the series, he is on a ship headed to China to find Mei Fong, the woman he loves, who he first met working on the railroad, & thought was a boy. But enough TV. I like it that writing is like walking on a country road. The air is so available how can anyone resist not making words out of it. Words in herds. The ox is not a horse the ox is an immodest geometry of living blood & vaudeville of bone. Each excretion is a revelation. There’s no odium at all in the fulcrum of the wave. No ambivalence in horn. Horns are a warning. Bernadette Mayer Proper Name & Other Stories cockeyed on a pillow. There are lumps & lunacies in the manufacture of perfume. Observatories in the rubble of the moon. Let’s go. Let’s go where the silences are general & the utterances are debonair as yo-yos. Sentences decisive as pistons. Phrases glazed with mayonnaise.