SweetPea

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,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 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 ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after nightwith dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,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 at midnight 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 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 burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons