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        HOWL

        For Carl Solomon

          I

    I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
    madness, starving hysterical naked,
    dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
    looking for an angry fix,
    angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
    connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
    ery of night,
    who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
    up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
    cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
    contemplating jazz,
    who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
    saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
    ment roofs illuminated,
    who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
    hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
    among the scholars of war,
    who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
    publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
    skull,
    who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
    ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
    to the Terror through the wall,
    who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
    Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
    who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
    Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
    torsos night after night
    with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
    cohol and cock and endless balls,
    incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
    lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
    Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
    tionless world of Time between,
    Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
    dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
    storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
    blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
    vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
    lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
    who chained themselves to subways for the endless
    ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
    until the noise of wheels and children brought
    them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
    battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
    in the drear light of Zoo,
    who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
    floated out and sat through the stale beer after
    noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
    of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
    who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
    pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
    lyn Bridge,
    lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
    down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
    off Empire State out of the moon,
    yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
    and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
    and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
    whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
    and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
    Synagogue cast on the pavement,
    who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
    trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
    City Hall,
    suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
    ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
    drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
    who wandered around and around at midnight in the
    railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
    leaving no broken hearts,
    who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
    through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
    father night,
    who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
    athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
    stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
    who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
    ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
    angels,
    who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
    gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
    who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
    homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
    light smalltown rain,
    who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
    seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
    brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
    and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
    to Africa,
    who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
    behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
    and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
    place Chicago,
    who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
    F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
    eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
    prehensible leaflets,
    who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
    the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
    who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
    Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
    of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
    down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
    wailed,
    who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
    and trembling before the machinery of other
    skeletons,
    who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
    in policecars for committing no crime but their
    own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
    who howled on their knees in the subway and were
    dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
    scripts,
    who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
    motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
    who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
    the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
    love,
    who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
    gardens and the grass of public parks and
    cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
    whomever come who may,
    who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
    with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
    when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
    them with a sword,
    who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
    the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
    the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
    and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
    sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
    threads of the craftsman's loom,
    who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
    beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
    dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
    the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
    on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
    come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
    who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
    in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
    but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
    rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
    in the lake,
    who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
    stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
    poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
    to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
    in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
    rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
    gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
    ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
    solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
    who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
    dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
    picked themselves up out of basements hung
    over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
    Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
    ment offices,
    who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
    the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
    East River to open to a room full of steamheat
    and opium,
    who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
    cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
    blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
    be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
    who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
    the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
    Bowery,
    who wept at the romance of the streets with their
    pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
    who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
    bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
    their lofts,
    who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
    with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
    by orange crates of theology,
    who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
    incantations which in the yellow morning were
    stanzas of gibberish,
    who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
    & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
    kingdom,
    who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
    an egg,
    who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
    for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
    fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
    who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
    fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
    stores where they thought they were growing
    old and cried,
    who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
    on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
    & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
    of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
    fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
    ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
    drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
    who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
    pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
    into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
    ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
    who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
    the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
    saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
    danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
    phonograph records of nostalgic European
    1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
    threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
    in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
    whistles,
    who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
    to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
    watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
    who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
    if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
    a vision to find out Eternity,
    who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
    came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
    watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
    Denver and finally went away to find out the
    Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
    who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
    for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
    until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
    who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
    impossible criminals with golden heads and the
    charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
    blues to Alcatraz,
    who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
    Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
    or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
    Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
    daisychain or grave,
    who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
    notism & were left with their insanity & their
    hands & a hung jury,
    who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
    and subsequently presented themselves on the
    granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
    and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
    stantaneous lobotomy,
    and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
    Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
    therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
    amnesia,
    who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
    pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
    returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
    blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
    man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
    East,
    Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
    halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
    ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
    dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
    mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
    moon,
    with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
    flung out of the tenement window, and the last
    door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
    slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
    nished room emptied down to the last piece of
    mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
    on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
    imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
    hallucination
    ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
    now you're really in the total animal soup of
    time
    and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
    with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
    of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
    ing plane,
    who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
    through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
    archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
    and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
    and dash of consciousness together jumping
    with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
    Deus
    to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
    prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
    ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
    fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
    of thought in his naked and endless head,
    the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
    yet putting down here what might be left to say
    in time come after death,
    and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
    the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
    suffering of America's naked mind for love into
    an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
    cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
    with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
    out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
    years.

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