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

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—
—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past—
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye—
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—
modern—all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown—
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos—all these
entangled in your mummied roots—and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul
too, and anyone who'll listen,
—We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.