honu:
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