+ 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 machin- +ery 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 +