PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

"Just about that time a strange thing began to haunt me.  It was this: I had forgotten something.  There was a decision that I was about to make before Dean showed up, and now it was driven clear out of my mind but still hung on the tip of mind's tongue.  I kept snapping my fingers, trying to remember it.  I even mentioned it.  And I couldn't even tell if it was a real decision or just a thought I had forgotten.  It haunted and flabbergasted me, made me sad.  It had to do somewhat with the Shrouded Traveler.  Carlo Marx and I once sat together, knee to knee, in two chairs, facing, and I told him a dream I had about a strange Arabian figure that was pursuing me across the desert; that I had tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before I reached the Protective City.  "Who is this?" said Carlo.  We wondered it.  I proposed it was myself, wearing a shroud.  That wasn't it.  Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven.  Naturally, now that I look back on it, this was only death: death will overtake us before heaven.  The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.  But who wants to die?  In the rush of the events I kept thinking about this in the back of my mind.  I told it to Dean and he instantly recognized it as the mere simple longing for pure death; and because we're all of us never in life again, he, rightly, would have nothing to do with it, and I agreed with him then."  - the protaganist Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac's classic novel "On the Road."