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 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