Howl

- Allen Ginsberg

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 tene- ment 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, burn- ing 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, al- cohol 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 drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront
boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks
of Brook- lyn, 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 after noon 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 Brook- lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off 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-grind- ings and migraines of China under junk-with- drawal 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 grand- father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep- athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in- stinctively
vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis- ionary 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 Okla- homa on the impulse of winter midnight street light 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 fire place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their
dark skin passing out incom- prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos
wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild
cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu- scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering
their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond
& naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed
shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual
golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can- dle and fell off
the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt
and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared
to sweeten the snatch of the sun rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and
Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet- ticoat upliftings &
especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up
out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open
to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of
the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
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 coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates
of theology, ....

The rest of Howl is here along with more of his beat poetry.

One book

One book

(revised from Tome of Hate - Glacian)

I-That-I-Am says that you should not eat ham
and if you erect a golden ram,
you shall be forever damned.
Thou shalt not think thou shall believe
even if prophets do deceive.
Paul says that He justified
That's how I know that he lied.

Would you, could you kill your son
If God commands that it be done?
Would you, could you rape a wife
Or end a heathen's blameless life?

The Bible says that its okay
beat that slave throughout the day.
The Bible condones theft and slaughter
stealing and raping a father's daughter.
Would you, could you burn a queer?
Does lust in your heart make you fear?
Are you judged by your actions
or are you part of the free-pass faction?

If you save the children and feed the poor
bring hope to those who have no more
but don't accept Jesus Christ,
should your soul be the sacrificed?

Would you, could you dash babes against stones
and deafen your ears against their moans?
Would you, could you stone another
if they blaspheme or curse their mother?

Could you ignore the contradictions
and believe in a work of mythic fiction?
Could you guide your conduct by archaic authors
and give cash to those church's coffers?

Could you believe that women are shamed
that for mankind's faults they are to blame?
Could you believe that an infinite being
That all knowing and all seeing
cares at all for whom you love
as He watches from above?

Homosexuals God forsakes,
that's why burn them at the stake
along with witches, heathens, and inquirers.
Don't ask questions of those inspired
for all the answers are already there.
God did it, question not, do not dare,
for questions plant the seeds of doubt
and Christians can't go down that route.

I say Truth is that which The Book opposes.
Don't subscribe to the lies of Moses.
Would you, could you believe this tome of hate
That has doomed so many to a hellish fate
not in the world beyond, but here on earth.
I ask of you: What is FAITH worth?

Of all the books burned throughout the ages
All the knowledge lost in the works of sages
it should have been the Bible’s pages
Torn asunder in righteous rages
To free mankind from religion’s cages.

To Praise
by Ellan Bass

I want to praise bodies
nerves and synapses
the shudder that travels the spine
like fish darting

I want to praise the mouth
that warm wet lair where the tongue reclines
and the tongue, roused
slithering a cool path

I want to praise hands
those architects that create us anew
fingers, cartographers, revealing
who we can become
and palms, cupped priestesses
worshipping the long slow curve

I want to praise muscle
and the heart, that flamboyant champion
with its insistent pelting like
tropical rain, fierce and fast

I want to praise hair
the sweep of it, a breeze, over skin
utter softness under the soles

and feet, arch taut
stretching like cats

I want to praise the face, engraved
like a river bed, open
a surprise, like laughter

breasts, cornucopia
nipples that jump up, gleeful
like a child greeting the day

and clitoris, shimmering
a huge tender pearl
in that succulent oyster

I want to praise the love cries
sharp, brilliant as ice
and the roar that swells in the lungs
like an avalanche

I want to praise the gush, the hot
spring thaw of it, the rivers
wild with it

Bodies, our extravagant bodies

And I want to praise you, how you have
lavished yours
upon mine
until I want to praise

Stephanie Strickland's The Red Virgin, a poem of Simone Weil

There Comes

If you do not fight it---if you look, just
look, steadily,
upon it,

there comes
a moment when you cannot do it,
if it is evil;

if good, a moment
when you cannot
not.


Gustave Thibon, How Simone Weil Appeared to Me/3

Kisses and embraces disgusted her.
I never saw her cry.
She loved tobacco.
Of all the things belonging

to material life, tobacco
was the only one
she was almost certain
to accept. This smoke

has been transformed into pages
covered with writing
in my copybooks, she said.
She was counting out one time

the money she had earned
harvesting grapes. I told her
I had no illusions about
the destination

of this sum, whereupon
she replied with disarming
spontaneity, But
I shall certainly also buy a few books.

The painful poignancy of desire
(Postromantic poetry)
Claudia Moscovici


Dream

Eyes sparkling deep
Lightest of sleep
Mouth full of kisses
All that I'm missing
Hands that explore
Lips that adore
Don't hesitate
Forget your regret
Delve into me
Swim in my sea
Ride on my waves
Find all enclaves
Richest of life
Passion and strife
Full of emotion
To and fro motion
Flow like a stream
Color my dream
Show me desire
Lift me up higher
Take my breath away
With your gentle sway
Give me a pleasure
Beyond all measure
Shine from afar
Explode like a star

Invitation

Concentric circles of expanding emotion
Fluttering wings of butterflies in motion
Light breath hastened by excitement
Trembling hands eager to find you
Soft body seeking your touch
Fine hair leaving waves in the sand
Warm lips melt your shyness away
Tears of love invite you to stay


My voyage to you

Delicate lips
Quivering under
My touch
The moistness I seek
Embraces me
Inviting and warm
Flickering tongue
Absorbed in the
Hollow of mouth
Lapping the shores
Of these lands
Made for love
I let the flow
And the movement
Of your breath
Warm up my life
As wondering hands
Explore on their own
Adored and familiar sites
The sweetness of your words

Give me the sweetness of your words
With the tip of your tongue
Let them glide into my mouth
Smoothly, wetly, generously
Let me savor the flavor of your thought
In the tingles that run through my being
In the feelings that condense into tears
Unarticulated, overwhelming, dense
Molecules of emotion too large
To flow through the pores of my skin
Pent up inside, but ready to burst
At your most delicate touch
At a barely whispered word
Into an unbearable surge of desire
Into the secret poetry that only
Our two bodies strained with the effort
Of an almost forgotten, soothing motion
That suckles the honey, the milk, and the spirit
From the sweetness of your words
Honeysuckle in the spring

When I was a little girl
My favorite season was spring
The breeze brushed
With its flowery scents
The dew off my skin
And my face bloomed
With an irrepressible smile
As I ran, greeting the wind
With all the joy I could express
Through the flowing
Uninhibited movements of my body
Out of breath, exhilirated
I would stop to touch the flowers
Breathing them through closed eyes
Bending over my favorite ones
Those little white stars
Twinkling among leafy ivy
Whose nectar I would suckle
Gently, smoothly, furtively
Pressing them between my lips
Savoring like a forbidden pleasure
The unforgettable taste, scent, feel
Of honeysuckle in the spring
That now, my love, only you can bring

C. Little, no less, I am always refreshed going to her site, photos and poetry and little bits of life.


i am a warrior
i am not at war
i am seeking peace.
i work for peace.
peace for us all.
peace for myself.
my struggles are your struggles.
my success is yours also.

i am a warrior.
the opponent is unseen.
i am a warrior.
the victory is not celebrated,
but felt.
the battles are bloodless
and brutal.
i am a warrior.
honor is my currency
and merchandise.

you are a warrior too.
your work is defined.
you proceed each day
until the sun drains you
and the moon cools you.
we all work together
as the best warriors do.
there is no war,
there is only living.
suit up!
time is passing.

Andrew Nagen

Boob Poem
Author Unknown

For years and years they told me,
Be careful of your breasts.
Don't ever squeeze or bruise them.
And give them monthly tests.

So I heeded all their warnings,
And protected them by law.
Guarded them very carefully,
And I always wore my bra.

After 30 years of astute care,
My gyno, Dr. Pruitt,
Said I should get a Mammogram.
"O.K." I said, 'let's do it."

"Stand up here real close" she said,
(She got my boob in line),
"And tell me when it hurts," she said,
"Ah yes! Right there, that's fine."

She stepped upon a pedal,
I could not believe my eyes!
A plastic plate came slamming down,
My hooter's in a vise!

My skin was stretched and mangled,
From underneath my chin.
My poor boob was being squashed,
To Swedish Pancake thin.

Excruciating pain I felt,
Within it's vise-like grip.
A prisoner in this vicious thing,
My poor defenseless tit!

"Take a deep breath" she said to me,
Who does she think she's kidding?!?
My chest is mashed in her machine,
And woozy I am getting.

"There, that's good," I heard her say,
(The room was slowly swaying.)
"Now, let's have a go at the other one."
Have mercy, I was praying.

It squeezed me from both up and down,
It squeezed me from both sides.
I'll bet SHE'S never had this done,
To HER tender little hide.

Next time that they make me do this,
I will request a blindfold.
I have no wish to see again,
My knockers getting steam rolled.

If I had no problem when I came in,
I surely have one now.
If there had been a cyst in there,
It would have gone "ker-pow!"

This machine was created by a man,
Of this, I have no doubt.
I'd like to stick his balls in there,
And see how THEY come out!
~~~~~~~~~~~

"Whoever thought up the word "Mammogram"? Every time I hear it, I think I'm supposed to put my breast in an envelope and send it to someone. "
-- Jan King

~~~~~^.^~~~~~~

"For my sister's 50th birthday, I sent her a singing mammogram."
-- Steven Wright

~~~~~^@^~~~~~