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MEXICO CITY BLUES
Other Works by Jack Kerouac
Published by Grove Press
Dr. Sax Lonesome Traveler Satori in Paris and Pic (one volume) The Subterraneans
MEXICO CITY BLUES
Jack Kerouac
Copyright © 1959 by Jack Kerouac
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Published simultaneously in Canada Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969.
Mexico City blues / Jack Kerouac.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9568-5
I. Title.
PS3521.E735M4 1990
813’.54—dc20 90-2748
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
MEXICO CITY BLUES
MEXICO CITY BLUES
NOTE
I want to be considered a jazz poet
blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam
session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses;
my ideas vary and sometimes roll from
chorus to chorus or from halfway through
a chorus to halfway into the next.
1st Chorus
Butte Magic of Ignorance
Butte Magic
Is the same as no-Butte
All one light
Old Rough Roads
One High Iron
Mainway
Denver is the same
“The guy I was with his uncle was
the governor of Wyoming”
“Course he paid me back”
Ten Days
Two Weeks
Stock and Joint
“Was an old crook anyway”
The same voice on the same ship
The Supreme Vehicle
S. S. Excalibur
Maynard
Mainline
Mountain
Merudvhaga
Mersion of Missy
2nd Chorus
Man is not worried in the middle
Man in the Middle
Is not Worried
He knows his Karma
Is not buried
But his Karma,
Unknown to him,
May end –
Which is Nirvana
Wild men
Who kill
Have Karmas
Of ill
Good men
Who love
Have Karmas
Of dove
Snakes are Poor Denizens of Hell
Have come surreptitioning
Through the tall grass
To face the pool of clear frogs
3rd Chorus
Describe fires in riverbottom
sand, and the cooking;
the cooking of hot dogs
spitted in whittled sticks
over flames of woodfire
with grease dropping in smoke
to brown and blacken
the salty hotdogs,
and the wine,
and the work on the railroad.
$275,000,000,000.00 in debt
says the Government
Two hundred and seventy five billion
dollars in debt
Like Unending
Heaven
And
