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Allen Ginsberg - Howl
Work rating: Medium

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, 
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 balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
        gardens 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 & naked angel came to pierce 
        them with a sword, 
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 
        in the lake, 
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-
        ment 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 steamheat 
        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 
        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 borsht 
        & 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 unsuccess-
        fully, 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 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
        whistles, 
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 
        blues to Alcatraz, 
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 
        daisychain or grave, 
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
        notism & were left with their insanity & their 
        hands & a hung jury, 
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-
        stantaneous lobotomy, 
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin 
        Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
        therapy occupational therapy pingpong & 
        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 mad
        man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the 
        East, 
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 
        moon, 
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 
        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 the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
        ing 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 
        Deus 
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 
        years. 
 
II 
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open 
        their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
        nation? 
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
        tainable 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 whose buildings are judgment! 
        Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
        ned governments! 
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 
        tomb! 
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 
        us! 
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 
        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`re 
        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 doctors 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 twenty-five-thousand mad com-
        rades 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 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 
        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
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