"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 machin- 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 who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan
angels staggering on tene- 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 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 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
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 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- 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 suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings
and migraines of China under junk-with- drawal
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- who studied Plotinus Poe 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 streets of Idaho seeking
vis- ionary
indian angels who were visionary indian who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed
in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa
on the impulse of winter midnight street 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 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 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- 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 who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling
before the machinery of other 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 manu- 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 who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens
and the grass of public parks and cemeteries
scattering their semen freely to 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 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 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 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 sun rise,
flashing buttocks under barns and naked 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 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 unemploy- who walked all night with their shoes full of blood
on the snowbank
docks waiting for a door in the East
River to open to a room full of steamheat 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 the rivers of 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 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 who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail
borsht &
tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking
for 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 unsuccess- fully,
gave up and were forced to open antique stores
where they thought they were growing 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 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 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 steam 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 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 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 who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of
hyp notism
& were left with their insanity & their 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- and who were given instead the concrete void of
insulin Metrazol
electricity hydrotherapy psycho- therapy
occupational therapy pingpong & 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 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 night- mare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the 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 last 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 ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe,
and now you're really in the total animal soup of
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- 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 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
eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that
shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of
their own bodies good to eat a thousand What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their
skulls and ate up their brains and imagi- Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and
unob tainable
dollars! Children screaming under the stairways!
Boys sobbing in armies! Old men Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless!
Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone
soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows!
Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch
the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun- Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood
is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten
armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni- bal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch
whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets
like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac- tories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks
and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose
soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose
poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose
fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch
whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels!
Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch!
Lacklove and manless in Moloch! Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am
a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened
me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch
whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light
streaming out of the sky! Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton
treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries!
spectral nations! invincible mad houses!
granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!
Pave- ments,
trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven
which exists and is everywhere about Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone
down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the
whole boatload
of sensitive bullshit! Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone
down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De- spairs!
Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds!
New loves! Mad generation! down on Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all!
the wild
eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They
jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying
flowers! Down to the river! into the Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where
you're madder than I am where
you must feel very strange where
you imitate the shade of my mother where
you've murdered your twelve secretaries where
you laugh at this invisible humor where
we are great writers on the same dreadful where
your condition has become serious and where
the faculties of the skull no longer admit where
you drink the tea of the breasts of the where
you pun on the bodies of your nurses the where
you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing
the game of the actual pingpong of the where
you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent
and immortal it should never die ungodly
in an armed madhouse where
fifty more shocks will never return your soul
to its body again from its pilgrimage to a where
you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot
the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist
national Golgotha where
you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect
your living human Jesus from the where
there are twenty-five-thousand mad com- rades
all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale where
we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets
the United States that coughs all night
and won't let us sleep where
we wake up electrified out of the coma by our
own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof
they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital
illuminates itself imaginary walls col- lapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled
shock of mercy the eternal war is here
O victory forget your underwear we're in my
dreams you walk dripping from a sea- journey
on the highway across America in tears to the
door of my cottage in the Western night
