The wanderers

"...and all the time I was thinking of Dean and how he got back on the train and rode over three thousand miles over that awful land and never knew why he had come anyway, except to see me. "So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."

* Lyric, bittersweet, stream-of-consciousness words by Jack Kerouac, from his novel On the Road * Poetry-on-film by young mum and gifted photographer Nirrimi Firebrace, from her blog The Road is Home (used with her kind permission)

I think you either love or you hate the non-conformist, loose and spontaneous creativity of the Beat Writers. I'm definitely in camp former. What do you think of them?