my howl
i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...
what sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
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 editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality
Cut[ting] their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried:
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch!
...whose mind is pure machinery! whose blood is running money!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Robot apartments! invisible suburbs![...]blind capitals! demonic industries! monstrous bombs!
...who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed?[...]returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood and tears
while you're not safe I am not safe
barreling down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch
they saw if all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! they bade farewell! they jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! down the river! into the street!
...with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat for a thousand years...
[closing blessing(damnation)]
the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die[...]never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void[...]where we wake up electrified out of the coma[!]