Lyrical Toad wrote like a blues man, like the blues man he was… meter, rhyme, meter, rhyme… If you can’t dance the slow boogie woogie to the blues, it aint the blues. Years and years of his life… meter, rhyme, meter, rhyme. Caught in the spokes of conformity.

Then Toad, from his horsehair lily pad thought, what if I stopped writing for the dancers in my head, and wrote foe the music in my soul instead? What if I stopped obeying all those rules, and just let words fall out of me, any words, all of the words? And, Toad closed his eyes and let himself go, no rules, no rhyme…

and for the first time in his life, he wrote about the night sky without using the words moon or stars, he wrote about joy without using the word happy, he wrote about Sarah without using the word beautiful, because he didn’t have to. The words told his every feeling, his every unchained emotion. No line lengths, no counting, just paragraphs of truthful, free poetry…

and Kerouac smiled over his coffee cup from wherever he was in the Universe at that moment, looked over, and saw that Ginsburg was smiling, too.