HOWL

for

Carl Solomon

I

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 & 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 toward poles of Canada & Paterson,