Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac

you know—woop, one more—so I’ll find out and let you know, aw, how things are,” Pat is saying on the radio as he stands at his firefinder marking X’s where he judges the lightning strikes, he says “Woop” every 4 seconds, I realize how funny he really is with his “woops” like Irwin and I with our “Captain Oops” who was Captain of a Crazy Ship up the gangplank of which on sailing day all kinds of vampires, zombies, mysterious travelers and harlequin clowns in disguise did troop on board, and when, en route sur le voyage, the ship reaches the end of the world and’s gonna plop over, the Captain says “Oops”
    A bubble, a shadow—
    woop—
    The lightning flash
    â€œWoop,” say people spilling soup—It really is dreadful, but the passer-through-everything must really feel good about everything that happens, the lucky exuberant bastard—(cancer’s exuberant)—so if a lightning bolt disintegrates Jack Duluoz in his Desolation, smile, Ole Tathagata enjoyed it like an orgasm and not even that
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    Hiss, hiss, says the wind bringing dust and lightning nearer—Tick, says the lightning rod receiving a strand of electricity from the strike on Skagit Peak, great power silently and unobtrusively slithers through my protective rods and cables and vanishes into the earth of desolation—No thunderbolts, only death—Hiss, tick, and in my bed I feel the earth move—Fifteen miles to the south just east of Ruby Mountain and somewhere near Panther Creek I’d guess a large fire rages, huge orange spot, at 10 o’clock electricity which is attracted to heat hits it again and it flares up disastrously, a distant disaster that makes me say “Oo wow”—Who burns eyes crying there?
    Thunder in the mountains—
    the iron
    Of my mother’s love
    And in the dense electrical air I sense the remembrance of Lake-view Avenue near Lupine Road where I was born, some thunderstorm night in the summer of 1922 with grit in the wet pavement, trolley tracks electrified and shiny, wet woods beyond, my apocloptatical paratomanotial babycarriage yeeurking on the porch of blues, wet, under fruited lightglobe as all Tathagata sings in horizoning flash and rumble bumble thunder from the bottom of the womb, the Castle in the night—
    Round about midnight I’ve been staring so intently out the window dark I get hallucinations of fires everywhere and near, three of them right in Lightning Creek, phosphorescent orange faint verticals of ghost fire that come and go in my swarming electrified eyeballs—The storm keeps lulling then sweeping around somewhere in the void and hitting my mount again, so finally I fall asleep—Wake to the patter of rain, gray, with hope silver-holes in the skies to my south—there at 177° 16′ where I saw the big fire I see a strange brown patch in the general snowy rock showing where the fire raged and spitted out in the allnight rain—Around Lightning and Cinammon no sign of lastnight ghost-fires—Fog seeps, rain falls, the day is thrilling and exciting and finally at noon I feel the raw white winter of the North sweeping from a Hozomeen wind, the feel of Snow in the air, iron gray and steel blue everywhere the rocks—“ My , but she was yar!” I keep yelling as I wash my dishes after a good a delicious pancake breakfast with black coffee.
    The days go—
    they cant stay—
    I dont realize
    I think this as I draw a ring around August 15 on the calendar and look, it’s already 11:30 on the clock and so the day half over—With a wet rag in the yard I wipe the summer’s dust off my ruined shoes, and pace and think—The hinge of the outhouse door is loose, the chimney piece is knocked over, I’ll have to wait a month for a decent bath, and I dont care—The rain returns, all the fire’s’ll lose their tinder—In my dreams I dream that