Fall Samhain Moon
Never read it or, if I did, forgot it. Studying it now in ModPo. Howl has some outrageously good lines. Here are a few:
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,
run down
by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other’s
hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
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.
