Moloch

HOWL

by Allen Ginsberg

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 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 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 Brooklyn 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 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 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 fireplace 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,  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 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 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. What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open  their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?  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 stunned governments!  Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose  blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers  are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal 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 factories  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! Despairs!  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! 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 collapse  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.