Gold Medal Software 2/Gold Medal Software Volume 2 (Gold Medal) (1994).iso/misc/howl.arj/HOWL.TXT

Text File | 1993-09-23 | 19KB | 351 lines

                           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 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 cool eyes
     hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the
     scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy and 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 pugatoried 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 toward poles of Canada & Patterson, illuminating
     all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solitudes of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine
     drunkenness over the rooftops, stonefront boroughs of teahead
     joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and trees
     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 battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the
     stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out
     of the moon,
yacketayacking 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 onto
     the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of
     ambiguous picture post cards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings an migraines
     of China under junk withdrawal 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 racketing through snow toward
     lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied plotinus Poe St. John of the cross telepathy and bop
     kabbalah because the cosmos 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 ecstacy,
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 behind nothing
     but the shadow of dungarees and the lava 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 haze of capitalism,
who distributed Super communist 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 up 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 and naked
     angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loverboys 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 candle 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 down 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 sunrise, flashing buttocks under
     barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars,
     Neal Cassady, secret hero of these poems, cocksman and adonis
     of Denver--joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
     in empty lots and 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 to a room
     full of streamheat and opium,
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 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 borscht & 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
     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
     steam whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each
     other's hot-rod Golgotha jail solitude watch or Birmingham
     jazz incarnation,
who drove cross-country seventy two 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 and 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 to Southern Pacific to the
     black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
     daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio hypnotism & were left
     with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCYN lecturers on Dadaism and
     subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the
     madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide,
     demanding instantaneous lobotomy.
and who were given instead the concrete void on insulin metrazol
     electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy
     pingpong and 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 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 ******, and the last fantastic look 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 in the
     closet, and even the 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 ellipse in the
     catalog the meter, and the vibrating plane,
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 Dues
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 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 years.


                              II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate
     up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
     dollars!  Children screaming under the stairways!  Boys
     sobbing in armies!  Old men weeping in the parks!  Moloch!
     Moloch!  Nightmare of Moloch!  Moloch the loveless!  Mental
     Moloch!  Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison!  Moloch the crossbone soulless
     jailhouse and Congress of sorrows!  Moloch the vast stone of
     war!  Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!  Moloch whose blood is running
     money!  Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!  Moloch whose
     breast is a cannibal dynamo!  Moloch whose ear is a smoking
     tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!  Moloch whose
     skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!
     Moloch whose factories 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 fat is a cloud of sexless Hydrogen!
     Moloch whose name is in 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 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!  special
     nations!  invincible madhouses!  granite cocks!  monstrous
     bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!  Pavements,
     trees, radios, tons!  lifting the city to Heaven which exists
     and is everywhere about us!
Visions! Omens! hallucinations! miracles!  ecstacies! 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!  Despairs!  Ten years' animal
     screams and suicides!  Minds!  New loves!  Mad generation!
     down on the rocks of Time!
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 street!


                              III

Carl Solomon!  I'm with you in Rockland
     where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
     where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
     where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
     where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
     where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
     where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in rockland
     where your condition has become serious and is reported on
     the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
     where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of
     the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
     where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of
     Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
     where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the
     Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
     where you scream in a straightjacket that you are losing the
     game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
     where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and
     immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
     where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its
     body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
     where you accuse your doctor of insanity and plot the Hebrew
     socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
     where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect
     your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
     where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together
     singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
     where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets
     the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
     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
     collapse   O skinny legions run outside   O starry-spangled
     shock of mercy the eternal war is here   O victory forget your
     underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
     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

                            1955-1956