Beat Poets

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 teh tops of cities contem-
plating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenements
roofs illuminated,
who passed through universtities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & pub-
lishing 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,

From HOWL by Allen Ginsberg