Howl, Parts I & II

I'll preface this by saying this is adult content and has foul language and I haven't read the while thing in a long time. Howevah, the Beat Generation of writers were important to American literature, and were ahead of their time in exposing the reality of youth. For whatever reason, I wanted to share this here.


by Allen Ginsberg


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,
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 Arkan-
sas 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 mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness 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 battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
escapes off windowsills of 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 railroad yard wonder-
ing 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 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 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 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 FBI in beards and shorts
with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
hensible 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 whom-
ever 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 con-
sciousness,
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 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 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 steam-
heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
son 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 regi-
ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
ing & 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 whis-
key 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 the 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 salva-
tion 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 lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
nesia,
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 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.


II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up
their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Chil-
dren screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old
men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Mo-
loch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-
house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judg-
ment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned govern-
ments!
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 skyscrap-
ers 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 ec-
stasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light stream-
ing 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! Pavements, 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 roofl to solitude! waving! carrying
flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

Just Be You

Be the best You you can be. Nobody else can.

Feel different, like a freak somehow?

Embrace the freak! Be different!

Toxic people just see something in you that makes them feel bad about themselves. Don't take it personally.

Don't stop being You, because that's what people want to see anyway.

To Remind Myself

Familiarity yields experience;
Experience yields confidence;
Confidence yields continuity;
Continuity yields expected results;
Expected results are the sum of familiarity.

S.A.D.

Maaaaaaan, so somehow I thought that with the new time change that the sun would be rising earlier, and it would be easier for me to get up in the morning and get started. Well looks like I was wrong. The sun is going to be rising around 730 now and I'm supposed to be work at 8:30 and it's already really hard for me to get started in the morning. I'm gonna be forced to go to bed mad early in order to get up to work out. Can't gamble on a day screwing up your workout routine come evening time. Life happens, ya know.

Okay I'm done generally complaining about something entirely out of my control.

Life Imitating Art

Want to hear the cruelest irony of my emotional life? I wrote "I'll Just Smile" about Matthew Richard Shumway, a song about liking him but being too shy to tell him and having no intention of ever doing so and being content the way things were between us. He died without knowing that song was about him.

He passed away on a Wednesday, July 20th, two days after I drove to Shands in Gainesville to see him in the ICU. A couple weeks prior to that he came into my mind for some reason, I don't know why. I had a boyfriend at the time, so I dismissed it. A long time ago I hid him from my facebook News Feed because I didn't want to be reminded of him, because I was trying to not like him and get over the whole somethingness/nothingness of the whole thing. Of course, with him comatose in a hospital bed and attached to a dozen machines, it was time to tell him everything, so I cried and recounted memories and said everything he'd deserved to hear.

You can't make this stuff up. Maybe I wouldn't feel as strongly for him as I do now if I hadn't made such an effort to keep him off my mind back when we lived in the same town. I made a conscious decision to not go after him; I could like him all I wanted, but I didn't want a drunk boyfriend, and he drank a lot. That choice was what was most healthy for me at the time.

I feel like a fool though, when I think back on the times I was sort of mean to him or ignored him. The very last time I saw him before he had his stroke was New Year's Eve 2010, and as we said our good-byes Gage had asked him, teasing me, "Shumway do you know Haylee?" Shum looked at me like the cat that ate the canary and said, "Yes, we know each other". Though we'd been acquaintances for over two years, at times with palpable emotional tension, I never felt like I knew him that well but always, always just wanted to spend some quiet time with him, play guitars or something. Like my song said, "I'd like to grow in what I know of your gentle soul by merely being near." He told me before I left, "I have unlimited texting now and we can shoot back rapid-fire messages" and I said, "Yeah, that'll be the day." He'd disappointed me so many times before; not texting me back when we first met, not replying to a facebook message I sent him once. For a second he seemed taken aback. Then his face softened as he said, "Yeah, that'll be the day." Gage, very protective of me, didn't think Shumway was good enough for me and he was proud of me for finally saying like, "No, I'm not going to get excited at the prospect of getting to know you better because I will not let you disappoint me again."

Is this honestly the last interaction I had with him? You can't make this stuff up.

I'm working on a song now about asking his permission to remember our history the way I wish it had happened. It was agony to accept my feelings for him and then see him suddenly. I would cling to my oath that I would not make a move on him, knowing full well he was entirely too shy to put the moves on me. The most forward he got was one day at the pub after a rugby match (picture me, track pants, jersey, no make-up). I said good-bye and had almost left the room when he said, "Hey Haylee?" I stopped and said, "Hey Matt?" and he looked down at the floor and mumbled, "You look really pretty today." Aaaaahhhhh!! I said thank you and went around the corner where I could giggle and jump like a teenager. When I'd confessed to Kerri and Gage that I had a crush on him, Kerri said, "How can you have a crush on Shumway!?" She didn't see what I saw, and neither did he.

You can't make this stuff up.

So how can I make art imitate life? I feel as if I haven't been very creative over the past year. There's so much more that happened between Shumway and me as nothing was happening, like the night we chatted on facebook at 3am the cloudy August night the Perseid meteor shower was on, trading youtube videos of songs we wanted the other to hear. I do want to remember everything accurately, except for the times I could've been more kind to him. One of the best was when we slow-danced on the porch at Mother's to some 1940's big band music. Pure magic. He was very good, and he confessed that his mother made him take ballroom-dancing lessons when he was younger. I still remember what it felt like to rest my face on his shoulder, to feel his cheek near my ear and the way he held my hand against his chest. And my mind wandering to the fact that I was wearing baggy khaki shorts and my crazy-lookin' "Love Is Real" Daniel Johnston t-shirt, haha.

This isn't at all where I thought this blog was going to go. I guess I needed to get this out. There are so many more memories I hope I'll always be able to recall easily. It would likely be more healthy to try to move on and find an interest in someone who hasn't been dead almost seven months, but the artist in me loves this agony. I always knew he was really special, and the fact that he was taken from us so young confirms this.

More cruel irony: the first time I went over to his house, he'd been trying to learn this song on guitar, with which I've been obsessed ever since: "Ghost" by Howie Day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmlr0Jc9hPQ

October Morning

The clouds are a ceiling this morning,

Just enough light coming through.

Am I letting it shine through me?

Under the overpass I see signs of life,

Probably not one you or I would want.

Am I just putting this thought away?

Each life that rides past me in its own vessel,

Some of them better or worse than others.

Am I judging a book by its cover?

People get so angry, sometimes so do I

At a person they will never meet.

I just cruise along in my seat,

Am I helping them get through their day?

Power lines connect us all

And give birds a place to sit before they

Launch a swirling formation.

Am I appreciating this beautiful performance?

So if we're all heading somewhere,

Different paths and destinations all,

Am I still going in the right direction?

The First On the Second

A most delightfully lazy day. Just sayin. Have a nice (real!) fire going in the fireplace, the Gators won the Gator Bowl, right now watching Ulster v Munster to study up on 15's. Hungry though, I see ramen noodles in my future.

2011 began with an emotional sprint and saw an 8.5-year streak go down. Then I got hit in the gut in July when Shumway died, and my collective heart-and-mind were wrenched out and run over on the highway. (This is him with my sister and me on New Year's Eve last year... sigh.)

Rugby was good to me all year, and I was good to it.

I am determined and newly inspired to learn to speak Spanish as I've discovered the music and voice of Alejandro Sanz, and I'm desperate to discover the lyrics.

Will I finish my own album in 2012? I'm having my doubts! Gotta be positive though. About everything, especially myself.

Worse Still

The friend I wrote about in my previous post is fine, recovering at home, taking better care of himself. Praise God.

I called that situation "The Unthinkable". Well, reality is quite frequently what we don't expect it to be. A young friend of mine, 27, died after eight days in a coma, induced to save his brain from a massive stroke he suffered out of nowhere. But the damage was done.

There are many reasons why I'm having trouble coming to grips with this. Pray for his parents, Larry and Theresa. His funeral is tomorrow, geography prevents me from attending.

Life is never fair, and God does things for His own reasons. A good friend of mine says that God can see the whole tapestry, while we can only see the little frayed tassels that hang down. I trust God and His plan, that'll never change. I just wish young people didn't have to be taken away to remind us all how much we take this life for granted.