Howl

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

HOWL By Allen Ginsberg

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

For Carl Solomon

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

--One--

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

[Howl @HowlThePoem]

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine