College

The excerpts of "Howl: I" that remind me of my University days. 

by Allen Ginsberg

___________________________________________

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

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...

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... 

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists 
jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills...

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes...

who studied Plotinus, Poe, St. John of the Cross, telepathy, and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas...

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 faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams...

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 scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish...

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time...

who sang out of their windows in despair...

who barreled down the highways of the past...

who drove crosscountry 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 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...

rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love...

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—

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & 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...

the madman bum and angel beat in Time,
unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death...

an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio..."

Read full poem here.