[Paleopsych] from Howl

[Steve Hovland]

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 
thestarry 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 fiats 'doating 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, I 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