-
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 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 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,
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 boxcarsboxcars racketing through snow
toward lonesome farms in grandfather
night,
who
studied
Plotinus
Poe
St
John
of
the
Cross
telepathy
and
bop
kabbalah because the universe
instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
wholoned
it
through
the
streets
of
Idaho
seeking
visionary
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 Oklahoma on the
impulse of
winter midnight streetlight 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 nothing
behind
but the shadow of dungarees and
the larva and ash of poetry scattered in
fireplace Chicago,
who
reappeared on
the
West Coast
investigating
the FBI
in
beards
and
shorts
with
big
pacifist
eyes
sexy
in
their
dark
skin
passing
out
incomprehensible
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 manuscripts,
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 rosegardens and the
grass
of
public
parks
and
cemeteries
scattering
their
semen
freely
to
whomever come who may,
whohiccuped
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
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
were prepared to sweeten the snatch
of
the sunrise, 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’
rick
ety
rows,
on
mountaintops
in
caves
or
with
gaunt
waitresses in familiar roadside lonely
petticoat 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 hungover
with heartless Tokay and horrors of
Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled
to
unemployment 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
full
of
steamheat
and
opium,
who
created great suicidal dramas on the appartment
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 the
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 an
Eternity
outside of Time, & alarm
clocks fell on their heads every day for the next
decade,
who cut
their wrists three times successfully
unsuccessfully, 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
sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by
the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute
Reality,
who
jumped
off
the
Brooklyn
Bridge
this
actually
happened
and
walked
away unknown
and
forgotten
into the ghostly daze of
Chinatown
soup alleyways
&firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who
sang
out
of
their
windows
in
despair,
fell
out
of
the
subway
window, jumped in the
filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over
the