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 machin-
ery
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 tene-
ment roofs
illuminated,
who passed through universities with
radient cool 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,
burn-
ing their money in
wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror
throught the wall,
who got busted in their public 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, al-
cohol 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 mo-
tionless world of
Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green
tree cemetary
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 Brook-
lyn, 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 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,
yacketayakking 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-grind-
ings and migranes of
China under junk-with-
drawel 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 grand-
father
night,
who studied Plotinus St. John of the Cross
telep-
athy and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at
their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the street of
Idaho seeking vis-
ionary 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 Okla-
homa on the impuls of
winter midnight street-
light smalltown
rain,
who lounged hungery 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. 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 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
policecars for commiting
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 manu-
scripts,
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
cemetaries scattering their
semen freely to
whomever come who
may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but
wound up
with a sob behind a patition
in a Turkish Bath
when the blond &
naked angel came to pierde
them with a
sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old
shrews of fate
to 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 can-
dle 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 consiousness,
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 sun-
rise, 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, cocksmen and Adonis of
Denver-- joy
to the memory of his
innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner
backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops
in caves or with
guant waitresses in familiar
roadside lonely pet-
ticoat 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 unemply-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full
of blood on
the snowbak docks waiting for
a door in the
East River to open to 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 laural 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 ricking and rolling
over lofty
incantations which in the
yellow morning were
stanzas of
gibberish,
who cooked rotton 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 for every
day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times
successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced
to open antique
stores where they thought they
were growing
old and cried,
who were buried alive in their innocent
flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts
of leaden verse
& the tanked-up
clatter of the iron regimants
of fashion & the
nitriglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising &
the mustardgas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors,
or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of
Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this
actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown
and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of
Chinatown soup alley-
ways & firetrucks, not
even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in depair,
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 record of
nostalgic European
1930's German jazz
finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the
bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of
colossal steam-
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past
journeying
to each other's
hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham's jazz
incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to
find out
if I 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 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
impossible criminals with
golden heads and the
charm of reality in their
heatrs 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 to Narcissus to
Woodlawn to the
daisychain or
grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the
radio of hyp-
notism & 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 in-
stantaneous
lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete
void of insulin
Metrazol electrisity
hydrotherapy psych-
therpy occupational
therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only
one symbolic
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 a life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone
as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last
fantastic bokk
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 fur-
nished room emptied down to
one last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow
paper rose twisted
on a wire hangar 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'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 & the vibrat-
ing 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 Aerterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor
human
prose and stand before you
speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame,
rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to
conform to the rhythm
of thought in his 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 goldhorn shadow of
the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked
mind for love into
an eli lamma lamma sabacthani
saxophone
cry that shivered the cities
down to the last radio
with the absolute heat of the poem of life
butchered
out of their own bodies good
to eat a thousand
years.
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