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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 machinery of the 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 tenement rofs 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, alcohol 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
motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine
drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joy-
ride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree 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 dear 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 Belle-
vue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stops 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-grindings and migraines of
China under junk withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard won-
dering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow
toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop
kabbalah because he 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 supernatu-
ral ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the
impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex
or soup, and flowed 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 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 manuscripts,

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 winds 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 eluding the last gyzm 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 the sunrise, 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 Den-
ver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty
lots & diner backyards, moviehouses; rickety rows, on mountaintops
in carves 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
hung over 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 steam-
heat 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 incarnations 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 out-
side 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 Ave-
nue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron
regiments of fashion & nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of
advertising & 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 alley says & 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 1930's German jazz finished the whis-
key 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 incarna-
tion,

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 Den-
ver& waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned
in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time & now Den-
ver 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 locomo-
tive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or
grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left
with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subse-
quently 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 of insulin Metrazol electric-
ity 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, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-
bench domen-realms of love, dreams of life a night- mare, bodies
turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally fucked, and the last fantastic book flung out of the
tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and with the last
telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of metal furniture, a yellow paper
rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
nothing but 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 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 Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejecting yet
confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of though 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.

San Francisco, 1955