Jack Kerouac’s Orange (An Origin Myth)

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it
and thinking about it … depending on your mind to exist! By itself it’s a no-thing …
it’s seen only of your mind
– Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Like Jack Kerouac’s Orange
I am awake for you baby
baby taste this flesh, smell
smell the myth of limonene
this orange wants to be seen
see me, hear me, touch me
make me become.

Make me a some-thing baby
baby don’t you feel the want
want to feel how it is
how it is to be empty
empty & awake & a no-thing
nothing unless of your mind?

Spilled out like squeezed sea
sea squeezed from an orange
a sodden orange from a Spanish ship
shipwrecked & empty & a no-thing
nothing except for the mind of a poet

‘thinking about it it’s really mental
things only seen of your own mind’.

But Jack got it wrong baby
I am not your orange
you may have me
in your mind’s eye
thinking about it & me
& all that existential baby

& you may say you saw me
saw me only & only me
& only of your mind

but it was me who was looking
baby I was looking at the apple
& it was me who was awake
awake & looking at the apple
it was always me baby
baby it was always me
who took the first bite.

Cáit is a straying archaeologist. At home in the Scottish Highlands, she makes films and writing with folk hoping to assemble good ways of living in this queasy world. Poems have been peeling from her since January 2021. This is one of her first. You can find her tweeting @kittyjmac.