Allen Ginsberg wrote the poem Howl which explains what people felt in the 1950's
Allen Ginsberg
(1926-1997)
Howl
For Carl Solomon
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, angel headed 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 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 towards 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 batallion 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 railway 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 universe 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 nothing behind but the
shadow of dungarees and the larva 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 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 were 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 hungover 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 full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment 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 the 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 an 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 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 lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented
themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the 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 on
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 vibrating
plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 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 incarnate 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 butchered out of their
own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
Bibiography:
http://www.wussu.com/poems/agh.htm
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