February 08, 2011

Excerpts From Howl


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        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-
              every 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 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, burn-
              ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
              to the Terror through the wall,
      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,
powerade by google
       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,
       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,
       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 sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
              bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
              their lofts,
       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 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.

"How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier."
-Alan Ginsberg-
America since 1945 class :D