FAT CITY: March 2009

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-
             ery 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 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, 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-
             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,
      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-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-
             father night,
      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
             angels,
      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
             light 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
             behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
             and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
             place Chicago,
      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-
             prehensible 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 manu-
             scripts,