Howl - Allen Ginsberg.mp3

[00:03.02]For Carl Solomon
[00:28.00]I
[00:29.90]I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
[00:34.84]starving hysterical naked,
[00:39.87]dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.
[00:44.78]Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.
[00:53.79]Who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high,
[00:56.46]sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.
[01:05.84]Who bared their brains to Heaven under the El,
[01:07.87]and saw ****mmedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated.
[01:13.55]Who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes,
[01:16.22]hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war.
[01:24.45]Who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull.
[01:33.35]Who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
[01:36.13]burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall.
[01:41.15]Who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of ********* for New York.
[01:47.55]Who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley,death,
[01:52.25]or purgatoried their torsos night after night.
[01:56.90]With dreams,with drugs,with waking nightmares,
[01:59.59]alcohol and **** and endless *****.
[02:03.03]Incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud,
[02:05.05]and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson,
[02:10.33]illuminating all the motionless world of Time between.
[02:14.15]Peyote solidities of halls,
[02:16.64]backyard green tree cemetery dawns,
[02:19.54]wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
[02:23.14]storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light,
[02:28.08]sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
[02:32.12]ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind.
[02:37.50]Who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine,
[02:42.62]until the noise of wheels and children brought them,
[02:45.74]down shuddering mouth-wracked,
[02:47.27]and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo.
[02:53.53]Who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated,
[02:56.46]out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's,
[03:01.68]listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox.
[03:05.92]Who talked continuously seventy hours,
[03:07.77]from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge.
[03:12.62]A lost batallion of platonic conversationalists,
[03:15.51]jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon.
[03:23.03]Yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts,
[03:26.26]and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars.
[03:32.32]Whose intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes,
[03:38.08]meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement.
[03:42.04]Who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey,
[03:44.24]leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall.
[03:49.09]Suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China,
[03:54.00]under junk- withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room.
[03:58.08]Who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go,
[04:02.52]and went,
[04:03.23]leaving no broken hearts.
[04:05.54]Who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars,
[04:08.08]racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night.
[04:13.13]Who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah,
[04:18.18]because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas.
[04:23.43]Who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels,
[04:27.72]who were visionary indian angels.
[04:31.06]Who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy.
[04:36.63]Who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma,
[04:39.39]on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain.
[04:44.44]Who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup,
[04:49.89]and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity,
[04:54.45]a hopeless task,
[04:55.44]and so took ship to Africa.
[04:58.58]Who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico,
[05:00.90]leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees,
[05:04.04]and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago.
[05:09.90]with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets.
[05:09.90]Who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts,
[05:21.81]Who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism.
[05:28.28]Who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union ******,
[05:30.52]weeping and undressing,
[05:31.84]while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down,
[05:35.35]and wailed down Wall,
[05:36.16]and the Staten Island ferry also wailed.
[05:39.39]Who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked,
[05:42.42]and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons.
[05:46.01]Who bit detectives in the neck,
[05:47.87]and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime,
[05:51.51]but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication.
[05:56.32]Who howled on their knees in the subway,
[05:58.08]and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts.
[06:02.43]Who let themselves be ****ed in the ass by saintly motorcyclists,
[06:05.75]and screamed with joy.
[06:08.49]Who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,the sailors,
[06:11.88]caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love.
[06:15.51]Who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries,
[06:21.12]scattering their ***** freely to whomever come who may.
[06:25.52]Who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath,
[06:31.51]when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword.
[06:36.63]Who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate,
[06:39.69]the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar,
[06:43.43]the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb,
[06:46.39]and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass,
[06:48.48]and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman.
[06:53.54]Who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed,
[07:01.71]and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall,
[07:07.07]with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness.
[07:13.03]Who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset,
[07:17.07]and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise,
[07:21.21]flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake.
[07:25.35]Who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars,
[07:29.29]N.C.,secret hero of these poems,
[07:33.03]*****man and Adonis of Denver —
[07:35.04]joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards,
[07:40.66]moviehouses'rickety rows,
[07:42.46]on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings,
[07:49.50]and especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns,& hometown alleys too,
[07:56.36]Who faded out in vast sordid movies,
[07:58.38]were shifted in dreams,
[07:59.59]woke on a sudden Manhattan,
[08:01.11]and picked themselves up out of basement s hungover with heartless Tokay
[08:05.66]and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams,
[08:08.08]and stumbled to unemployment offices.
[08:11.11]Who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks,
[08:15.51]waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and *****.
[08:21.21]Who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson,
[08:25.72]under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion.
[08:33.03]Who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery.
[08:40.40]Who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music.
[08:46.14]Who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge,and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts.
[08:52.76]Who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame,
[08:56.02]under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology.
[09:01.01]Who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish.
[09:09.09]Who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom.
[09:16.16]Who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg.
[09:20.69]Who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time,
[09:25.52]and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.
[09:29.92]Who cut their wrists three times successfully unsuccessfully,
[09:33.03]gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried.
[09:38.38]Who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue,
[09:42.42]amid blasts of leaden verse,
[09:45.12]and the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion,
[09:48.48]and the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising,
[09:52.22]and the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors,
[09:55.69]or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.
[10:00.06]Who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge,
[10:02.16]this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks,
[10:08.04]not even one free beer.
[10:10.23]Who sang out of their windows in despair,
[10:12.46]fell out of the subway window,
[10:14.66]jumped in the filthy Passaic,
[10:16.76]leaped on negroes,
[10:17.47]cried all over the street,
[10:19.19]danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz,
[10:26.26]finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet,
[10:30.26]moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles.
[10:34.39]Who barreled down the highways of the past,
[10:36.63]journeying to each other's hotrod -Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation.
[10:43.93]Who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision,
[10:47.37]or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity.
[10:51.99]Who journeyed to Denver,
[10:53.53]who died in Denver,
[10:54.24]who came back to Denver & waited in vain,
[10:57.57]who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver,
[11:00.87]and finally went away to find out the Time,
[11:03.63]and now Denver is lonesome for her heroes.
[11:07.97]Who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
[11:14.14]until the soul illuminated its hair for a second.
[11:18.18]Who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads,
[11:23.43]and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz.
[11:29.61]Who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit,
[11:32.42]or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha,
[11:34.34]or Tangiers to boys,
[11:36.26]or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive,
[11:38.83]or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave.
[11:42.45]Who demanded sanity trials,
[11:44.44]accusing the radio of hypnotism,
[11:46.46]and were left with their insanity
[11:48.08]and their hands & a hung jury.
[11:51.15]Who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism,
[11:55.35]and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads,
[11:59.86]and harlequin speech of suicide,
[12:03.33]demanding instantaneous lobotomy.
[12:06.58]And who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy,
[12:14.14]pingpong & amnesia.
[12:17.38]Who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
[12:21.63]resting briefly in catatonia.
[12:24.07]Returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood,
[12:28.08]and tears and fingers,
[12:29.67]to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East.
[12:34.04]Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls,
[12:38.38]bickering with the echoes of the soul,
[12:40.48]rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love,
[12:45.45]dream of life a nightmare,
[12:48.51]bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon.
[12:50.74]With mother finally *****,
[12:52.52]and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window,
[12:56.44]and the last door closed at 4 A.M.,
[12:58.78]and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply,
[13:01.88]and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,
[13:06.66]a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet,
[13:10.30]and even that imaginary,
[13:12.02]nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination —
[13:15.15]Ah,Carl,while you are not safe I am not safe,
[13:19.19]and now you're really in the total animal soup of time —
[13:24.12]And who therefore ran through the icy streets，
[13:28.28]obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane.
[13:39.02]Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed,
[13:45.45]and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images,
[13:50.50]and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together,
[13:56.46]jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus.
[14:00.75]To recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose,
[14:05.55]and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame,
[14:11.11]rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head.
[14:18.18]The madman bum and angel beat in Time,
[14:23.23]unknown,yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death.
[14:27.27]And rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band,
[14:34.94]and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love,
[14:38.38]into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio.
[14:46.25]With the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
[14:53.85]II
[14:57.25]What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
[15:09.09]Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!
[15:14.14]Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!
[15:17.17]Children screaming under the stairways!
[15:20.02]Boys sobbing in armies!
[15:22.12]Old men weeping in the parks!
[15:24.42]Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch!
[15:28.03]Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
[15:35.05]Moloch the incomprehensible prison!
[15:38.38]Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows!
[15:44.24]Moloch whose buildings are judgement!
[15:47.47]Moloch the vast stone of war!
[15:50.50]Moloch the stunned governments!
[15:54.45]Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!
[15:58.48]Moloch whose blood is running money!
[16:01.91]Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!
[16:05.59]Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
[16:08.48]Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
[16:13.90]Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
[16:17.79]Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas!
[16:23.39]Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog!
[16:29.29]Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
[16:34.07]Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone!
[16:38.80]Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!
[16:43.83]Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius!
[16:47.47]Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
[16:52.52]Moloch whose name is the Mind!
[16:56.25]Moloch in whom I sit lonely!
[16:59.46]Moloch in whom I dream angels!
[17:03.36]Crazy in Moloch! ********** in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
[17:10.80]Moloch who entered my soul early!
[17:14.68]Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body!
[17:18.88]Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
[17:23.66]Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
[17:32.23]Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! Invisable suburbs! Skeleton treasuries!
[17:39.13]Blind capitals! Demonic industries! Spectral nations! Invincible madhouses! Granite *****! Monstrous bombs!
[17:49.19]They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!
[17:52.52]Pavements,Trees,Radios,Tons!
[17:55.70]Lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
[18:00.18]Visions! Omens! Hallucinations! Miracles! ecstacies! Gone down the American river!
[18:09.29]Dreams! Adorations! illuminations! Religions! The whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
[18:16.16]Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! Gone down the flood!
[18:22.62]Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years'animal screams and suicides!
[18:28.42]Minds!New loves! Mad generation! Down on the rocks of Time!
[18:34.43]Real holy laughter in the river!
[18:37.37]They saw it all! The wild eyes! The holy yells! They bade farewell!
[18:43.07]They jumped off the roof! To solitude! Waving! Carrying flowers! Down to the river! Into the street!
[18:52.52]III
[18:55.55]Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland,
[18:58.54]Where you're madder than I am.
[19:01.01]I'm with you in Rockland,
[19:02.51]Where you must feel strange.
[19:05.25]I'm with you in Rockland,
[19:07.10]Where you imitate the shade of my mother.
[19:10.10]I'm with you in Rockland,
[19:11.66]Where you've murdered your twelve secretaries.
[19:14.14]I'm with you in Rockland,
[19:16.16]Where you laugh at this invisible humour.
[19:18.81]I'm with you in Rockland,
[19:20.22]Where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter.
[19:24.42]I'm with you in Rockland,
[19:25.52]Where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio.
[19:30.30]I'm with you in Rockland,
[19:31.83]Where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses.
[19:35.03]I'm with you in Rockland,
[19:36.46]Where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica.
[19:41.41]I'm with you in Rockland,
[19:42.99]Where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx.
[19:47.07]I'm with you in Rockland,
[19:48.77]Where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss.
[19:54.45]I'm with you in Rockland,
[19:55.54]Where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal,
[19:59.59]it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.
[20:03.69]I'm with you in Rockland,
[20:05.09]Where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void.
[20:13.13]I'm with you in Rockland,
[20:14.72]Where you accuse your doctors of insanity
[20:16.62]and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha.
[20:22.22]I'm with you in Rockland,
[20:23.69]Where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb.
[20:30.30]I'm with you in Rockland,
[20:31.72]Where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale.
[20:39.39]I'm with you in Rockland,
[20:40.89]Where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep.
[20:48.84]I'm with you in Rockland,
[20:50.09]Where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls'airplanes roaring over the roof,
[20:58.05]They've come to drop angelic bombs,
[21:00.15]The hospita illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse,
[21:05.10]O skinny legions run outside,
[21:08.11]O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here,
[21:14.01]O victory forget your underwear we're free.
[21:15.21]I'm with you in Rockland,
[21:16.16]In my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America,
[21:23.13]in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.