Howl- carl solomon (texte en anglais)

Howl

For Carl Solomon

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 Arkan-

sas 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

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and

endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind

leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-

tionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-

enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs 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

mind,

who 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-wracked and battered bleak of brain

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 Fugazzi's, 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 windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and

anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall 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 at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-

ing 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 Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah

because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned 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 the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse

of winter midnight streetlight smalltown 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 incompre-

hensible leaflets,

who burned

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