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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Peter Gutmann wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:9A043F3CF02CD34C8E74AC1594475C73F4C3B53A@uxcn10-tdc05.UoA.auckland.ac.nz"
type="cite">
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<pre wrap="">"I've seen prisons."!!
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<pre wrap="">
I've seen troopships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
Peter.
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<br>
I've seen: "...bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, with
mother finally ******,"<br>
<br>
<blockquote>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, <br>
<br>
...angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry 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 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 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, 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
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-grindings and migraines of China under
junk-withdrawal 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 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 impulse 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 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 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 pederasty 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 seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic
and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in
rosegardens 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 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 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 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 roadside lonely petticoat 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 unemployment 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 steam-heat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the
apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blur
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
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 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
steamwhistles, 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 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
instantaneous lobotomy, and who were given instead the concrete
void of insulin Metrazol electricity 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 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 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
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 intelligent and shaking
with shame, rejected yet confessing 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.<br>
<br>
<br>
End Stanza I<br>
<br>
Howl By Allen Ginsberg<br>
<br>
For Carl Solomon<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179381">http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179381</a><br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
RR
"Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers ... And neutralize them, neutralize them, neutralize them"</pre>
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