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
......lightening 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,...

'HOWL' c. 1956 Allen Ginsberg

Note: The line length of this format will not accommodate the spacial integrity of this poem. I have reproduced it as near to its original City Lights 'Pocket Poets' edition as possible.

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