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 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
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 towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the
motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard
green tree cemetery 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 Brooklyn, 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
afternoon 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 Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost batallion 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-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal
in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at
midnight in the railway 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 universe
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 the Chinaman of
Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight 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 nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees
and the larva 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 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 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 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 rosegardens 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 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 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 consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls
trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were 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 these poems, cocksman 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 gaunt
waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat 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 hungover 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 full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment
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 the rivers
of the 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 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 an Eternity outside of Time, & 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 & 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 into the ghostly daze of
Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who
sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in
the filthy Passaic, 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 Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who
drove crosscountry seventytwo 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 impossible criminals with golden
heads and the 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 to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded
sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their
insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at
CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite
steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide,
demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete
void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy 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 madman 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, 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 fucked, 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 on 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 vibrating plane,
who
dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 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 confessing 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 incarnate 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 eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the
cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem
butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
II
