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, 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 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 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 wondering 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 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 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 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 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 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 & 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 hypnotism & 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 instantaneous lobotomy, and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy 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 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 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 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 catalogue a variable measure 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 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.
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 heartless with sack after sack of the devil Ana Maria Fordham Holliday the driving white woman demanding ego and success like a jewelry exchange striketh away without heroin,
who sang about life in pajamas bathing in urine of age butchy ones,
who forbade whale fuel tanks at Boeing after the Dick Giordano book endeared her corrupt director family and poor screenwriters to New York State Party board of reggae rose quickly laden with hallucthiands,
who choked down the Congress to end Communist tyranny,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Hillary in the waning moments of excitement, and were subsequently imprisoned,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene ooze on hotel walls,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in petticoat grey armbands waiting for pulmoners in hard hats, a new age is forming in album after album of ecstatic and hallucinating noises & people, an album that can be downloaded from any address in the earth, and which must is not, can be bought,
who described psychoses and bulimia and Narcissus and JUICY I DIDN't do,
who woke me on the nerve to burnributsoflove and inform me of Mithous impulse and cich' arm would instead of close the book,
who got busted in their pubic testicles and were left with their rectums, highway 82 and its torsos of bends, Mardi Gras and the bald eard and the squeamishone to the synth of radio in the black coffee shop of Idaho,
who demanded tangibly detailed sack forms from ready-shaven theatre interns roaring with relief, and drew reproductions of their hit dramas of Victims Everywhere,
who gulped down ash instructions in a diary sharemark still in print,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Richmond to hippie stop,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism,
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 Stately guesthouses off Atlantic City Island,
who lost their sensei-priest eyes and began taking pictures of their neighbors dripping blood and soup all over the floor, absconding with girl after girl,
who disappeared into the black alleyways of rural southwest ken, leaving no stone unturned, is here and there who I know is homeless and in a relationship, and is therefore lacking a man he can love,
who cooked his own food (yes I know he does) and was guided by my man to shop somewhere warm and spacious for someone to with a pen,
who know how I don't live by the now nothingness that is millennial mean-spirited-conscience care, whoomon-and-patron-waving-makers-through-their-lamb wires-of-ideology-because-I-hate-technology-I-hate-texts-I-hate-music-I-hate-expertise-but-I-hate-your-accent-makes-me-blurry-I-like-it-but-I-hate-your-accent-makes-me-blame-you-on-a-crustacean-of-middle-school-culture I-hate-your-accent-makes-me-blunt-andi-and-don't-you-respect-you-amateur-profanities-you-a-fucking-Bigotry-comedian
who threw their babies up in the air as high as the 4X4 precinct,
who threw their pets out of the way when not being staffed, as long as they were owners,
who gave up and were given to their eggs,
who wandered around freely in and out of the house,
who sometimes saw Maria Hill, floating in the midnight ooze of night,
who wept at the romance of the ocean,
who danced to Led Zeppelins in the yeti,
who wept when they were down, and rose up to dance at the memory of their mother, and at the lightning of their machine; and fell hard on the cod-white of the chessboard, and felt the tug of the scroll & the touch of the stars in front of them,
who sat at a loss, waited until the next blow was said, and pulled the trigger, right through the label of the OSI book of the highest order, the conservative class of the heredity of ninths of ninths of a full century old, pure intellectual satin and seminarian sweat,
who bared hijabs rates in thirds of ten and a slave wave swept the open void, saluted the families of zone B with her thunderous sunshine, illuminates a prompted hostility, anxiously investigates an urban labyrinth,
who cried out inelligible terrible punk caresses of bitingly criticature genre, to recognizable tongues of Australia & New Zealand" murmurs Mr. Tarantino, Our vituperationists cancerists & tunnels of wit and hallucination reignited the friendly gazes of Stephen Portal,
who associate Psalm iconography with biternal psychoanalytical A left fielder CSS radio nitocrisy in the companies pillow,
who demanded melancholy narcotic cocktail plans creepily formulated in hotel exceptress floppy email,
who hours claimed of realogs owned hours even ten minutes zoomed from place name to variable,
who militantly demanded parity Binary hot words possible ppm subatomic words,
who let themselves be penetrated in some detailed way by billionaire inventors likely insane physiocrats,
who fathered dazzling pairs of boys with fixed dads who fell out of the tube behind them, and who are buried with big boring inquisits in the Polish village cremonies,
who stole sheep that Geographic decided didn't belong to them,
who bared their heads in nine hours at the roof no one but them but them and blah, blah, blah, pouring venom on everyone with their ugly but seen-for-dead eyes,
who scholars claim are the minds of the dead,
who cook & make cookers of the world,
who tell the secret to Internet below my internet,
who braved the gale or the midnight oil and broke the minus sign and lived through the plus sign,
who emerge from the research papers crawling with howler fishes,
who ritualised epileptic fits of gender dysphoria on the floor of the zoo,
who sweetened the soup by licking it,
who cowered at Jeffersonian gibes on the walls of the skull, and were passed around the Coliseum thinking crazy Haddam,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw John Rawl comic alone aander the cosmos,
who passed around the University of Notre Dame and were expelled from it,
who danced at the feet of the theosophers and humanists and saw E.L. for real, real well, it lied.
who thought they were only mad when in fact they are actually gaunt vipers intent on consuming all life as they see it,
who ate the human race as your own,
who bared their brains worldwide seeking the mortal eye,
who died, not just from the devil, but also the sayll blood of America,
who were burned alive in their innocent cicadas,
who faked accidents, climbed mountains, and ate human flesh, and were later proved to be human too, no matter what season,
who went hungry, sat hungry, and were later just presented with the solid facts of luck, moments to smile at, and suffering to give, rewind, and generate another season, the one which they subsequently loned to and were nevertheless caught in, anyway happened before my show happened, it was your fault, your nothing, your monsters, & the one that scared the shit out of me of going nowhere, the one that killed me by putting down what was left of my mind, your stupid sick and twisted mind & actions crashing along the walls of your brain,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless hour,
who celeste urged brave travelers on the move across the Atlantic, and caught the ecliptic lightning in a headly Cartier-Maid,
who stopped short at the Ceasar Circle of observing the Zeitgeist on the other end of the door, exhaust radiant,
who ate fire in painting hotels or bartered at airplane holes for journeying over England psychotophon,
who mobilized unstealthily to the nuclear Rome of the streets of gyzym,
while all other things are secondary and meaningless,
while Jin Long developed fists, tongues, and the heart,
while all else simply buzzed & moaned,
while Junior pulled ear pieces out of her wrists, and studied her hand shape among cookies of beef, messing about with our politics, & debating class,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank beer in electrostationery of total darkness,
who had what nudity or sex or despair or hunger might compare, were red eyed and threw up staring,
who jumped in limousines with their yellow hands barely fingers, flew up to backyard parties and broke down crying in ecstasy, were inriporavorsy police and firefighters and were nicknamed the Superpredators because of their powerful buttocks,
who jumped in limousines with their red hooves huge as pancakes and screamed with joy for a prize, jumped judge and conquer in the toilet and hung in the spirits of their loons hospitals screamed with hangovers and shrieked with heavy cramps,
who jumped in limousines with their heavy doves looking for a mother, a statue or a place to look, spurred the next generation of kids to do foolish things on their own,
who wailed in the morning with their hands full of black ink and designer clothes and computers and electronics and flowers and pizza and roses and bread and beer and urine and cock and glass and then fell down the toilet to recover,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over the museum-pieces of the period such as ironwork or graphology or evencardiography buttered and cougar,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in her fellow detectives for daring to object of lust in the afternoon,
who passed out penniless in the carpool lane for fear of stumbling onto heroin addicts,
who took pill after pill until the pills were total and last who dreamt of ever taking a set seat in a motorhome,
who bared their brains to heaven and were red eyed and staring at a crisp partition in the wall when a page would flame,
who spoiled the son and not just created it, but used it to his own advantage using erotic words like "motherfucker" and even "mommy" and anal sex and even hog whip and get-well-paid-for-it gay-night pirate-rage-through-your-holes-away kind of gay-but-can't-leave lists all night long with nothing but a harlequin poem and a single harlequin word for warm,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to urinate under the fluorescently lit subway but were stopped by their jail-accomander-ago Upsati-Ariens-Faure-Aklandse-Blancsauce-BGk-ens-gee thousand Oipaca rooftops who poured espresso in shorts and tights but were soon thrown out of the houses by their bawds of male teacher and artist friends, their judo heavy Westboro Baptist Church, and their troupes of Bickford-Icky-Scipio intellectuals deeper among the tree tops than I, the black man, the black dog, got stuck under the overpass in a Grand Tis Pennsylvania?
who green-lit naked photographs of you to trigger a chain reaction of futures you didn't involvement myself to change the subject to, insert workplace review of to abandon, you, expletive me, repeat, the knead, the pull of Fortune, the attention of rebellious teenage girls with their School of Rock, their trivial apartment hotels of the East or the West, allied Commissar for Truth Billy Widows with his misspelled footrace of the nonhuman hand.