HOWL
               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 



Footnote to Howl written in 1996.

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
    Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The
    tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in
    eternity! Everyman's an angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy
    the ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy
    Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy
    the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of
    Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands
    marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled
    with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crzy
    shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers
    Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul!
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the colcks in space holy the
    fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the
    visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the
    abyss!
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering!
    magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!