Howl (For Carl Solomon)
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Now, for better or worse, the generally considered
To be piรจce de rรฉsistance, uh, yeah, will resist
It needs no introduction. Mr. Allen, give it a go
Now with all this misery and unhappiness
In the world, read something nice
(Laughter)
Can you turn that, can you close that, dim that, and
Raise up lights in there, so I can see? That's nicer
I'll start off by reading a book which is
Going to publish, called Howl for Carl Solomon
(Laughter)
I will put up-
Some danger
No, cut out all the bullshit now, let's-
(Laughter)
So I would prefer to read without the, without
Without the, really without, without, uh-
Sound effects
Sound effects and without uh-
Static
Static, without, without hip static
(Laughter)
I have a dedicatory page to read also, also
Dedicatory page to Jack Kerouac, new Buddha of American prose, who
Spit forth intelligence into eleven books written in half the number
Of years, 1951 to 1956. On The Road, Visions of Neal, Doctor Sacks
Springtime Mary, The Subterraneans, San Francisco Blues, Some of
The Dharma, Book of Dreams, Wake Up, Mexico City Blues, Visions
Of Gerard. Creating himself a spontaneous bop prosody in original
Classic literature. Several phrases and the title of Howl are
Taken from him. To William Seward Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch-
(Laughter)
An Endless Novel, which will drive everybody mad
(Laughter)
To Neal Cassady, author of The First Third, an
Autobiography, 1949, which enlightened Buddha
(Laughter)
All These Books Are Published in Heaven
(Laughter)
And to Lucien Carr, recently promoted to
Night Bureau Manager of New York United Press
Howl for Carl Solomon
One
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-like tragedy
Among the scholars of war
Who were expelled from the academies for crazy
And 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 brawls
Incomparable blind streaks of shuddering clouds
And lightning in the mind
Leaping toward poles of Canada and Paterson
Illuminating all the motionless world of time between
Peyote solidities of walls
Backyard green tree cemetery dawns
Wine drunkenness over the rooftops
Storefront burrows 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 mindWho 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-racked and battered, bleak of grain
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 fugazzis
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
Window-sills, off Empire State, out of the moon
Yackety-yacking, screaming, vomiting, whispering
Anecdotes and facts and memories and eyeball kicks
And shocks of hospitals and jails and wars
Whole intellects disgorged in total rakol
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 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 grandfather night
Who studied Plotinus, St. John of the Cross, telepathy and bopkabbalah
Because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas
Who loomed 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 a Chinaman of Oklahoma
On the impulse of winter midnight streetlight small-town 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 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, whoa, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed
And Bird was wailing the most at Birdland
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 police cars
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 bawled in the morning and the evening in rose gardens
And the grass of public parks and cemeteries
Scattering their semen freely to whoever, 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 and naked angel came to pierce them with a sword
Who lost their love-boys 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 snips the intellectual golden threads of the grass in bloom
Who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer
And a bottle of beer and a bottle of beera sweetheart
A package of cigarettes, a candle, and fell off the bed
And continued along the floor and down the wall
And ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and cum
Illuminating the last jism 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 sunrise
Flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lakes
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 and diner backyards, movie
Houses, rickety roads, on mountain tops
In caves, or with gaunt waitresses in
Familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
And especially secret gas station solipsisms
Of johns and hometown alleys too
Who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams
Woke on a sudden Manhattan, picked
Themselves up out of basements hungover
With heartless tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
And 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 cliffbanks of the Hudson
Under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon
And 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 under the tuberculous 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, borscht and 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 ballots for eternity
Outside of time and 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 and the tanked-
Up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion
And the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising
And 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 days
Of Chinatown soup alleyways and 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 streets
Danced on broken wine glasses 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
Hot-rod Golgotha jail solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation
Who drove cross-country seventy-two
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 and waited in vain
Who watched over Denver and brooded and loned in Denver
And finally went away to find out the time
And now Denver is lonesome for our heroes
Who fell on their knees in hopeless
Cathedrals praying for each other's salvation
And light and breath 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 locomotives
Or Harvard to Narcissus
To Woodlawn to the daisy chain or grave
Who demanded sanity trials
Accusing the radio of hypnotism
And were left with their insanity
And their hands and 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, Metrasol, electricity
Hydrotherapy, psychotherapy, occupational therapy
Ping pong and amnesia
Who in humorless protest
Overturned only one symbolic ping pong table
Resting briefly in catatonia
Returning years later truly bald
Except for a wig of blood and fingers and tears
To the visible madman doom of the wards
Of the mad towns of the East
Pilgrim States, Rocklands and Greystones
Feated halls bickering with the echoes of the soul
Rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude
Benched dolmen realms of love
Dream of life a nightmare
Bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon
With mother finally fucked
And the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window
And the last door closed at four 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 the sudden flash of the alchemy
Of the use of the ellipse, the catalog, the meter
And the vibrating plane
Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps
In time and space through images juxtaposed
And trapped the archangel of the soul
Between two visual images
And joined the elemental verbs
And set the noun and dash of consciousness
Together jumping with sensation
Of Pater Omnipotens Aeterno Deus
To recreate the syntax and structure
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 what might be left the same
In time come after death
And rose reincarnate in the clothes of ghostly jazz
In the gold horn shadow of the band
And blew the suffering
Of America's naked mind for love
Into an aly aly lama lama
Sabachthani 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, ash cans and unobtainable dollar
Garbage heap of eyebrows and brains
Children screaming under the stairway
Boys sobbing in armies
Old men weeping in the park
Moloch, Moloch, nightmare of Moloch
Moloch the loveless
Mental Moloch
Moloch the heavy judger of men
Moloch the incomprehensible prison
Moloch the cross-boned soulless jailhouse
And congress of sorrows
Moloch whose buildings are judgments
Moloch the vast stone of war
Moloch the stunned governments
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery
Moloch whose blood is running moneyMoab whose fingers are ten armies
Moab whose breast is a cannibal dynamo
Moab whose ear is a smoking tomb
Moab whose eyes are a thousand blind windows
Moab whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs
Moab whose factories dream and croak in the fog
Moab whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities
Moab whose love is endless oil and stones
Moab whose soul is electricity and banks
Moab whose poverty is a specter of genius
Moab whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen
Moab whose name is a mine
Moab in whom I sit lonely
Moab in whom I dream angels
Crazy in Moab
Cocksucker in Moab
Lack love and manless in Moab
Moab who entered my soul early
Moab in whom I am a consciousness without a body
Moab who burns down the love of the world
Moab whom I abandon
Woke up in Moab
Light streaming out of the sky
Moab
Moab
Robot apartments
Invisible suburbs
Skeleton treasuries
Demonic mills
Blind capital
Ghostly bureaucracies
Spectral nations
Invincible madhouses
Granite cocks
Monstrous bombs
They broke their backs lifting Moab to heaven
Pavements
Trees
Radios
Tons
Lifting the city to heaven which exists and is everywhere about us
Visions
Omens
Hallucinations
Miracles
Ecstasy
Gone down the American river
Dreams
Adoration
Illumination
Religion
The whole boatload of sensitive bullshit
Breakthroughs
Over the river
Flips and crucifixions
Gone down the flood
Highs
Epiphanies
Despair
Ten years animal screams and suicides
Minds
New loves
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 streets
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 straitjacket that
You're losing the game of the actual ping-pong 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
Rebellion 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 35,000 mad comrades
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
Oh skinny legions run outside
Oh starry spangled shock of mercy
The eternal war is here
Oh 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