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, illumi
nating
all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree
cemetery dawns, wine
drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs
of tea-
head joyride 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 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,
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 am-
biguous
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
wondering
where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
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 supern-
natural
ecstasy,
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 appeared on the West
Coast investigating the FBI in beards
and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin
and pass-
ing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette
holes in heir arms protesting the narcotic to-
bacco 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 ped-
erasty 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
and in the evenings in rosegardens and the
grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their
semen
freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccupped 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 heterosexual dollar he 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 bear and a sweetheart
a package of cigarettes and a candle and fell off the
bed, and
continued along the floor and down the hall and ended
faint-
ing 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
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
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 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 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 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 bare-
foot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic
European
1930s
German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groan-
ing
into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast
of
colossal steamwhistles,
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 crim-
inals
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
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 sui-
cide,
demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the
concrete void of insulin Metrazol
electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational ther-
apy 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 madman 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
mid-
night 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 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 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 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 ellipsis catalog a
vari-
able measure & 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 sen-
sation 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, 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.
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 whose buildings
are
judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the
stunned
governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is run-
ning
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 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 con-
sciousness
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 trea-
suries!
blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral 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! 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! 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'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 He-
brew
socialist revolution against the fascist national Gol-
gotha
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 to-
gether
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
San Francisco, 1955-1956