behold this fool who,in the month of June,
having certain stars and planets heard,
rose very slowly in a tight balloon
until the smallening world became absurd;
him did an archer spy(whose aim had erred
never)and by that little trick or this
he shot the aeronaut down,into the abyss
-and wonderfully i fell through the green groove
of twilight,striking into many a piece.
I have never loved you dear as now i love

god's terrible face,brighter than a spoon,
collects the image of one fatal word;
so that my life(which liked the sun and the moon)
resembles something that has not occurred:
i am a birdcage without any bird,
a collar looking for a dog,a kiss
without lips;a prayer lacking any knees
but something beats within my shirt to prove
he is undead who,living,noone is.
I have never loved you dear as now i love.

Hell(by most humble me which shall increase)
open thy fire!for i have had some bliss
of one small lady upon earth above;
to whom i cry,remembering her face,
i have never loved you dear as now i love

We shared a camp down there in...Oralville at the foot of the Feather River canyon comin out of Keddie on the western Pacific. Keddie, up at the top of the canyon, still has a wooden water tower...it's never been torn down and you can camp under it. Anybody ever been there? Up in the high Sierra? Ah, it's beautiful.
Jack and I were in that camp...that's where he said to me, you know he'd been trampin since 1927...said "I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labour I will henseforth cease to work."
You don't have to go to college to figure these things out. No sir.
He said, "I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true that the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition."
Fat chance.

As dawn approached, there were less than twenty moving bodies in the camp. One of the Jokers I'd been talking to earlier had become fascinated with the word "shunt." It caught his ear when I referred to them having been "shunted off" to a bad campsite. He repeated the word with a grin, then went off to play with it for a while. Several hours later I heard him urge another Joker: "Say, man, let's go into town and shunt somebody." By four in the morning the word had grown like a tumor in his consciousness and he wandered around the fire, button holing people and asking, "What would you do if I said I was gonna shunt you?" Or "Say, man, can you lend me some shunt until morning? I'm hurtin." Then he would laugh distractedly and stagger off toward the remains of the beer mountain, which by that time was built almost entirely of empties.