Allen Ginsberg

Have you heard of beatnik? Jack Kerouac? Allen Ginsberg? The original generation x, sacrificed to the Moloch of society and hung up on drugs till they were driven mad...
some excerpts:

The Howl, for Carl Solomon

i)
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 connec-
tion 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 halluci-
nating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the
scholars of war

[part one is about 5 pages long so i wont give you all of it, just my favourite bits]

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 were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison
Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter
of the iron gates of the 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 taxi-
cabs of Absolute Reality

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 humour
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 you scream in a straitjacket 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 rocklands
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