- 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 -