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 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, 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
. . .
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
of Capitalism,
. . .
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 hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a
partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde & naked angel came to pierce them
with a sword,
. . .
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom
of the rivers of Bowery,
. . .
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
—Allen Ginsberg