Howl - I - (Lee Hyla, Allen Gi

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, angel-headed 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 cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-like tragedy among
The scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy
And 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 the radar with a belt of marijuana for
New York, who ate fire and paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, yes, or purgatory their torsos night after night with
Dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and
Endless balls, incomparable blind streaks of shuddering cloud and
Lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada and Paterson
Illuminating all the motionless world of time between, peyote
Salinities and walls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine
Drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride
Neon blinking traffic light, sun moon and tree vibrations in the
Roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings in kind cave 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-racked 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 Fugazzis listening to
The crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously
Seventy hours from park to bath to bar to bellevue to museum to the
Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of Platonic conversationalists
Jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire
State out of the moon, yackety-yacking 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 grindings and
Migraines of China under junk withdrawal 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 grandfather night, who studied Plotinus, Poe, St
John of the Cross, telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos
Instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned 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 a Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight
Streetlight small-town 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 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 rolls 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 police cars 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 bawled in the morning and the evening 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 and naked angel came to pierce them with
A swordWho 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 candle
And fell off the bed and continued along the floor
And down the hall and ended fainting on the wall
With the vision of ultimate cunt and come
Eluding the last jism 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 sunrise
Flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake
Who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen nightcars
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 and diner backyards
Movie houses' rickety rows
On mountain tops and caves and with gaunt waitresses
And familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
And especially secret gas station solipsisms of johns
And hometown alleys too
Who fade 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
And 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 to a room full of steam heat and opium
Who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff
Banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon
And 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
Borscht and 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
And alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade
Who cut their wrists three times successively 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
And the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion
And the nitroglycerine shrieks of the furies of advertising
And 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 and fire trucks (not even one free beer)
Who sang out of their windows in despair
Fell out of the subway, jumped in the filthy Passaic
Leaped on Negroes, cried all over the street
Danced on broken wine glasses barefoot
Smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz
Finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet
Wolves in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles
Who barreled down the highways of the past
Journeying to each other's hot rock Golgotha jail solitude watch
Or Birmingham jazz incarnation
Who drove cross-country seventy-two 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 and waited in vain
Who watched over Denver and brooded and loathed in Denver
And finally went away to find out the time
And now Denver is lonesome for her heroes
Who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals
Praying for each other's salvation and light and breath
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
And 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 daisy chain or a grave
Who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism
And were left with their insanity and their hands in 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 instantaneous lobotomy
And who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrasol, electricity, hydrotherapy, psychotherapy
Ping-pong and amnesia
The marvelous protest overturned only one symbolic ping-pong table
Resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bold
Except for a wake of blood and tears and fingers
To the visible madman doom of the wards of the mad towns of the East
Pilgrim States, Rocklands, and Graystone fetid halls
Bickering with the echoes of the soul
Rocking and rolling in the midnight
Solitude bench dolmen realms of love
Dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon
With Mother finally asterisked
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 furnished 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 are really in the total animal soup of time
And who therefore ran through the icy
Streets obsessed with the sudden flash
Of the alchemy of the use of ellipsis catalogue
A variable measure in the vibrating plane
Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in
Time and space through images juxtaposed
And trapped the archangel of the soul between two 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 them speechless and
Intelligent and shaking with shame
Rejected in confessing out the soul
To conform to the rhythm of thought in the 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 gold-worn shadow of the band
And blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
Into an "Eh, eh, lama lama sabachthani" 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