Howl

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 machinery 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 tenement roofs illuminated

Who passed through universities

With radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas

And Blake light tragedy among

The scholars of money and 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

Burning 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

Alcohol and cock and endless balls

Incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud

And lightning in the mind leaping towards

Poles of Canada Paterson

Illuminating all the motionless world

Of Time between

Peyote solidities of halls

Backyard green tree cemetery dawns

Wine drunkenness over the rooftops rooftops

Storefront boroughs of teahead joyride

Neon blinking traffic light

Sun and moon and tree vibrations

In the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn

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 afternoon 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 Brooklyn Bridge

A lost batallion 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

Whose 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 grindings

And migraines of China under

Junk withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room

Who wandered around and around

At midnight in the railway 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 grandfather night