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 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