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8/18/09 03:22 pm - "HOWL" by Allen Ginsberg
"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 the tenement roofs
illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled form 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, alcohol
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 motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetary
dawns, wines 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 min,
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,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists
jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yaketayakking 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 tele-
pathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively 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 the only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with Chianmen of
Oklahoma 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 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 to 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 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 love boys to three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew who 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 cand-
le and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of the 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 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 those
poems, cocksmans and Adonis of Denver - joy to
the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots and diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pety-
coat 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 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 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 rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who satin 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 unsucc0
essfully, 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
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 steamwhistles,
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 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 & 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
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 or Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanitary trials accusing the radio
of hypnotism & 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 instant-
aneous 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 sym-
bolic 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 nightmare,
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 lasy 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 -
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 & vibrating
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 intelligent
and shaking with shame, rejected yet confession
out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angle 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 hand 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 absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
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 the tenement roofs
illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled form 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, alcohol
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 motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetary
dawns, wines 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 min,
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,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists
jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yaketayakking 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 tele-
pathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively 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 the only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with Chianmen of
Oklahoma 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 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 to 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 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 love boys to three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew who 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 cand-
le and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of the 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 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 those
poems, cocksmans and Adonis of Denver - joy to
the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots and diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pety-
coat 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 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 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 rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who satin 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 unsucc0
essfully, 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
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 steamwhistles,
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 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 & 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
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 or Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanitary trials accusing the radio
of hypnotism & 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 instant-
aneous 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 sym-
bolic 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 nightmare,
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 lasy 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 -
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 & vibrating
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 intelligent
and shaking with shame, rejected yet confession
out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angle 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 hand 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 absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
