What's more, today is also Alan Ginsberg's birthday, an intriguing fellow who wrote a critical poem/letter that shaped my young adult life more than a decade ago (though it was written a lot longer ago than that). An abstract way to deliver a serious and radical message -- that was my biggest takeaway when I first read the piece. While there are tons of incredible writers and minds on this planet, to be able to express your thoughts in almost cryptic ways, so much so that it becomes something more than art, but it is art in itself, abstract poetry of insightful expressions, where the art truly protrudes from it, while at the same time capturing an idea or ideas that are real and here -- that is true magic.
The title to this masterpiece is Howl, a piece that I memorized when I was 15 and recited to a class that I had in high school. Time certainly flies.
Here is a snippet of Howl, in tribute to the birth of Mr. Ginsberg. Cheers!!
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 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, 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 motionless 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 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....
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