HOWL

 



by Allan Ginsberg

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 





San Francisco 1955-56