66Tonight the full apogee May moon will out, early with a jaundiced tint, & pop angels all over my rooftop along with Devas sprinkling flowers, pilgrims dropping turds & sweet nemanucalar nameless railroad trains from heaven with omnipotent youths bearing monkey women that will stomp through the stage waiting for the moment when by pinching myself I prove that a thought is like a touch, unless someone sicks a hot iron in my heart or heaps up Evil Karma like tit and tat the pile of that and pulls my mother out her bed to slay her before my damning dying human eyes and I break my head on heads—Everytime you throw a rock at a cat from your glass house you heap upon yourself the automatic Stanley Gould winter so dark of death after death, & growing old, because lady those ashcans’ll bite you back & be cold too, and your son will never rest in the imperturbable knowledge that what he thinks he thinks as well as what he does he thinks as well as what he feels he thinks as well as future that.

Future that my damn old sword cutter Paison Pasha Lost the Preakness again.

Tonight the moon shall witness angels trooping at the baby’s window where inside he gurgles in his pewk looking with mewling eyes for babyside waterfall lambikin hillside the day the little arab shepherd boy hugged the babylamb to heart while the mother bleeted at his bay heel—And so Joe the sillicks killit no not—Shhhhoww graaa—wing & car-start—The angels devas monsters asuras Devadattas Vedantas McLaughlins Stones will hue & hurl in hell if they don’t love the lamb the lamb the lam of hell lambchop. Why did Scott Fitzgerald keep a notebook? Such a marvelous notebook.

67Komi denera ness pata sutyamp anda wanda vesnoki shadakiroo paryoumemga sikarem nora sarkadium baron roy kellegiam myorki ayastuna haidanseetzel ampho andiam yerka yama chelmsford alya bonneavance koroom cemada versel

(The 26th Annual concert of The Armenian Convention)

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note:

Sections 1-49 of Old Angel Midnight were first published in Big Table, Spring 1959. Sections 50-67 were published in Evergreen Review, August/September 1964. Sections 50 and 51 appeared as “More Old Angel Midnight” in New Directions in Prose & Poetry No. 17 (1961). In 1992 John Sampas found “A Piece of Old Angel Midnight” amongst Jack Kerouac’s papers.

I am indebted to Kathleen Manwaring of the Syracuse University Library for sending a xerox copy of Jack Kerouac’s manuscript for sections 50-67 from the Grove Press Archive.

More Old Angel Midnight

Old Angel Midnight the swan of heaven fell

and flew cockmeek

Old Angel Midnigh the night onta twelve

Year Tart with the long bing bong

and the big ding dong

The boy on the sandbank blooming the moon,

The sound won’t let me sleep and since I

found out time is silence Manjusri won’t

let me hear the swash of snow no mo

in ole no po

O A M

Oh O M