King of the Beats, King of the Beats,
they all wanted to drink with him
and once they got the poor sensualist going,
happy to have company now, he would drink 'til he found the drunkenness he knew, a kind of freedom, a wild sensation.
But then the next day, depression,
the kind of deep worries, remembered sorrows, his failings looming over him,
part of the chemical addiction, the cycle.

The writing broke free of that cycle though, at least often enough, resetting his bearings and his calm and one gathers it was good for him on a physical molecular level, good for his nerves, his sense of self, his sense of a job, a profession, a place in the world. Phlebitis was his nervous system telling him he needed to write, just write, forget the other attempts of jobs, the scary hard physical stress of being a brakeman with Cassidy.

"Once I go out, I cannot stop," I think to myself sometimes, and writing is a job that requires you full time.

Maybe it was sad for him to be a writer, as few understood him as a real writer, except the crazies, the loners, the druggies, the drifters, the homosexual intellectual Russian Jew American (who even then upbraided him for going on too long if he really wanted to get published.) Books he wanted, craved, like the studiousness his letters speak of, well-read, not so much the need to be social, but of putting dreams and murmurings down on paper.

The human creature is gentle. It needs Zen quiet and peace, tea and broccoli.
Twenty years I've put up with the mad show, of people,
and no one seemed to appreciate the scholar, the serious learned heart and habit of the working class fellow from humble Canuck Lowell. Few scholars would have accepted him into their ranks, looked beneath a troublesome stereotype that might be somedays true. The same reason we like books with cases of mistaken identity. They fit on a writer.

I am a writer, it's what I do,
was what he knew,
with an ambition.
Slowly he built the objects
and lived in places that would be small museums
to himself and a time and a method,
an achievement
of letters.