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