The actual materials are important. A book at the nightstand is important - a light you can get at - or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

Sometime I’ll lay down my wrath, As I lay my body down Between the ache of breath and breath, Golden slumber in the bone.

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

So the problem for the poetic artist or the photographer is the common problem of continuous attentiveness, continuous attempts to notice what he is noticing, continuous alertness to catch himself thinking or seeing, devotional attentiveness to the world he's moving through.

Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.