Lyrics Howl - Allen Ginsberg

For Carl Solomon
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 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 towards 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 batallion 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 railway 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 universe 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 nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva 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 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 were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake
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 full of steamheat and opium
Who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment 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 the 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 an 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 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 lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the 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 on 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 vibrating plane
Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 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 incarnate 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 butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years
What sphinx of cement and aluminium 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 judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running 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 Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke 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! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! 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! ecstacies! 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!
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 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 humour
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 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 twentyfive thousand mad comrades 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 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