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,
angleheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of the 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 cool eyes hallucinating Ar-
kansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academics for crazy and 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 public 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 & Patterson, illuminating all the
motionless world of Time between
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetary dawns, wine
drukenness over rooftops, storefront, boroughs of teahead
joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibra-
tions 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 Brickford'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 Bellvue
to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge
a 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 anec-
dotes 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 Newarks bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard won-
dering 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 cosmos 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 im-
pulse 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 Amer-
ica 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
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 pederastry 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 seraphin, the sailors, caresses of
Atlantic and Carribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of
public parks and cemetaries 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
piece them with a sword,
who lost their loverboys 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 craftman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
package of cigarettes a candle 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 coma 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 sunrise, 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 road-
side lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station so-
lipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke up on a
sudden Manhatten, and picked themselves up out of basements
hung-over 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 EastRiver to open to a room full of
steam-heat 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 pf 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 if 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 phono-
graph 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 or Birmingham jazz incarna-
tion,
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 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 thier 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 daisy-
chain 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 lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instan-
taneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electric-
ity 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 in the closet, and even that imagi-
nary, 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 ellipsis catalogue a variable
measure and the vibrating 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 consciouness together jumping with sensation of Pater Om-
nipotens 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 throught 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 brians 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 jail-
house 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 cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose sky-
scrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch
whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-
stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electric-
ity 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 Mo-
loch!
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! invisble suburbs! skeleton trea-
suries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invin-
cible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, ra-
dios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere
about us!
Visions! omens! illuminations! religions! ecstasies! gone down the Ameri-
can river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensi-
tive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixations! gone down the flood!
Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams! and sui-
cides! 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! wav-
ing! 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 invisble 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 mad-
house
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never retrun your soul to its body again
from its pilgrimage to a cross in the wind
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 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
San Francisco, 1955-1956