This is the Tom Hartman program.

I could have done a lot worse than sitting skid row drinking wine. To know that nothing matters after all. To know

there's no real difference between the rich and the poor to know that

eternity is neither drunk nor sober to know it young and be a poet.

Could have gone into business and ranted and believed that God was concerned.

Instead, I squatted in lonesome alleys, and no one saw me.

Just my bottle.

And what they saw of it was empty.

And I did it in the cornfields and graveyards.

To know that the dead don't make noise to know the corn stocks talk among one another

with raspy old arms. Sitting in alleys, digging the neons, watching the cathedral custodians, ring out

their rags beneath the church steps. and drinking wine and in rail yards being divine.

To be a millionaire and yet to prefer curling up with a poor boy today in a warehouse door facing

long sunsets on railroad fields of grass.

To know the sleepers and the river are dreaming vain dreams, to squat

in the night and know it well, to be dark, solitary, eye-nerve watchers of the world's

whirling Diamond.

That's Jarrett Carowack.

That Skid Row Wine.

His birthday was yesterday.

He would have turned 102. Happy birthday, Jack Kerouac.

And thanks everybody.

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