shaking his shake like

I finally finished Jack Kerouac’s Book of Sketches. The story goes that in 1951, Jack’s friend Ed White encouraged him to do like painters do and make sketches in the street but with words instead of paint. And so Kerouac did. He began writing down prose poem “sketches” in the small notebooks he kept in his shirt pocket. For two years he recorded his travels, observations, and meditations on art and life as he roamed around America and Mexico. The Book of Sketches is a compilation of all his sketch notebooks.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s like a prose poem version of Robert Frank’s The Americans. The book left me inspired to do the same, to create little prose poem sketches of my day. Since I mentioned Robert Frank, I thought I also might go back to doing Hipstomatic snapshots throughout the day and add those with the prose poem sketches.

Alright, here goes the first one… (oh and I might as well add a modern twist and add make the prose poem sketches hypertext prose poems sketches…how about that?!

girl – bun in her hair
bouncy breasts little tan
backpack – watching
her from a stain-glassed window
lifting heavy weights on the bench today
outside playing on my bluetooth headset

the parking ticket attendant
walks like John Wayne
how did he get this job
bullying people he can’t see
just another filthy agent of the state –
massive control

Punching the weight up to 130kg
it’s not what a body looks like
it’s what a body can do that counts.

all american nightmare
making those good girls bad

Short dude in the locker room
shaking his shake like he shakes
his thing…way too long

people are broken,
what’s the point of
trying to fix them

focus on doing my thing
like frank santra, not the cake
version but this

that’s it
i go into the evening, fresh

Oh and this puppy arrived today from the States:

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