Howl

of Zoo,

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

rantings and kind king light of mind,

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

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

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,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

I

For Carl Solomon

Howl

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

mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free

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 collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of