2011-11-05 “Howl” By Allen Ginsberg remixed by Breezy Kiefair Part 1

Text:

I saw the best minds of my generation valiantly struggling to destroy the madness, starving hysterical educated,

dragging themselves through the occupied streets at dawn looking for a fix to their righteous anger,

angelheaded hempsters 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 class warfare,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El train and saw First Nation spirit guides pale and staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with perscribed narcotic hazed eyes.. desperatley trying to conquer physical pain inside the dream of Ginsberg’s school whilst Debting Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war and peace,

whose doctors with the stroke of a pen excluded them from the academies for weak immune response & too many hospital visits and too much time off required…… and so retired to being a ghost in the machine publishing controversial essays on the benefits of cannabis therapy for the sick.

who cowered in rotten canvas tents in long dirty clothes, burning their resin, paying their land bills and heating canned goods on a candle in the absence of an indoor stove whilst listening to the Terror echoing still today and through the years,

who got busted for their sacramental pipes returning through Maine with a story of hope for Cleveland, Michigan and Colorado.

who grew fire out back of low end hotels in their RV or drank resin tincture on Paradise Mesa, dug in until death, conditions and the cold of hell in their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, cannabis and lack and endless wails,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Mexico and the whole prohibition world, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote spirits haunting the land of no halls, backyard green tree cemetery falls, canna-bliss blowing over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teapotparty joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusk’s of the valley, ashcan rantings and kind cannabis on compassion makes you light of mind,

who chained themselves to their occupation. for the endless ride from park to holy jail on love and hope until the noise of mace and sticks brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the fear light of the memory of the dead man from the Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of the capitol building and when riot police came floated out and sat through the stale beer/coffee house dawn in desolate 16th Street, reading the crack of doom scroll across their social media news feeds.

who posted information continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Twin Towers onto of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, gifts for the Sacred place just cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen horizon mirage above reality’s plane. leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of the beauty of the world.

Who found it better suffering sweats and bone-grindings and migraines of junk-withdrawal in an MMJ state’s bleak furnished room, with the comfort of a pipe in hand and the knowledge they could use as much of this as their pain required and not worry about an unintended death.

who wandered around and around at midnight in the occupied parks wondering where to go, and remained, leaving no broken hearts except for their own, and even it, scrawled across a bit of cardboard and peacefully expressed for all of the anger and stress madness within their breasts.

who lit hash filled cigarettes at truck-stops truck-stops truck-stops racketing through snow toward lonesome freedom Maine in grandfather night,

who studied St. Jude, astral projection, and bop kabbalah, Rastafarian, the Egyptian book of the dead, the epic of Gilgamesh, and more because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Nebraska.

who longed through the streets of Ohio seeking visionary First Nation guides who were visions themselves

who thought they were only mad when they have every right to be mad and their righteous indignation gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in pig cars on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight small-town blizzard Maine,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through ‘Mosa seeking meds or heat or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to the safety of the horse-lands,

who disappeared into the underground leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the rocks we gathered for the house and ash of my heart scattered on the land, self sustainable American dream in ashes because I cant fund it beyond the empty land, and even that is for sale for survival’s sake.

who reappeared on the East Coast investigating the medicinal cannabis programs in other states in purple pure gift scarf and with big pacifist eyes sexy in their pale skin passing out information and stories in exchange for housing like a true bard of old.

who cold turkey-ed cigarettes repeatedly protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism (and picked them back up again in PTSD coping mechanism to throw them back down again and again),

who screamed in favor of the Cannabis haze of capitalism…. who distributed Congressional Supercommittee petitions in Universal Online square weeping and exposing the secrets of their hearts while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the severe weather sirens also wailed,

who broke down crying in protest parks as if they had been left naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who used their whit to strike at detectives and shrieked with delight in police-cars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and duty to protest.

who howled on their knees in the igloo and were dragged off the sidewalks waving signs and screaming valid points,

who let themselves be maced in the face, and screamed with joy for truth exposed,

who believed in equality for all, caresses and hints of unconditional love

who occupied in the morning and in the evenings and sent messages to delegation rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their opinions freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a public forum when a small & vulnerable woman came to hear their wailing song.

who lost their loves to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom, (DEATH!)

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who shared themselves ecstatic and insatiable and fell off the net, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate hope and prosperity eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, and a lighting a fire of self sustainability desire

who sweetened the minds of a million hearts trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the image of the sunrise, flashing truths under sad eyes and naked in the soul,

who went out traveling through Colorado in myriad stolen rides, A.G. secret hero of these poems, poet and activist of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable fingers given to censoring conformists and cigarettes shared with corrupted youth in Naropa writing work shop breaktime day. I sing to you on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside debates & especially quiet help in dreams.

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden nightmare, and picked themselves up out of heart sore despair… not drunk yet hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Wall Street’s iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their souls full of dread on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the 1% to open to a room full of steamheat and and lack of worry,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appeasement of bankers of the Stock market under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build revolutions in their parks, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the acid rain skies surrounded by orange crates of theology wishing for wide open spaces,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, rambling and unpublishable without a proofreader’s eye

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for a banana,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next century,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were tortured alive in their innocent flannel suits on social security disability amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, your government docs say your too sick to work, your government says your life is worth $17.42 a day. Make that work you sick lady in the wild all on your own.

who were trapped on the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of the protests, not even one tagline

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the dream’s window, jumped in the filthy Greyhound, leaped on haters, cried all over the street, danced on broken glass pipes barefoot..

who polar bear-ed it across frozen mesa to prove a point to psychopathic husband…. smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz screamed it was 1929 again, finished the joint and still stumbled down the hall just in time for their disease to make them throw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal auditory sensitivity.

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch a widespread panic incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loaned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to the social media class,

who retired to MMJ state to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or France to teach medicine or Southern border to live cheaply or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the feds of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw Knowledge at political pundits and gave lectures on history to representatives and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous reversion to the constitution,

and who were given instead the concrete void of mainstream media, refused electricity, cold-water hydrotherapy long before the dawn, applications for protest trademark names, occupational therapy in the for of police brutality & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic table, resting briefly in catatonia as the peaceful prepare their souls for pain.

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the corruptions and small-town censorship of infanticide in the East,

Pueblo State’s mountain views and Excelsior’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with bio-family finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination— yet in the mind hope still remains

ah, working class, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

whose written dreams made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel citizen in Time, unknown, yet posting here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

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II

What Harpy of regulations bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Inequality! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Inequality! Moloch! Nightmare of Money! 1% the loveless! Mental Moloch! State controlled Media the heavy judge of men!

Class Warfare the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Super-Congress of sorrows! Wall Street whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Money for the stunned governments!

My country whose mind has become pure machinery! My Country whose blood is running money! My Country whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! My Country whose ear is an unknown and smoking tomb! My country who adopted me and is therefore my parent.

My parents whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! My parents whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! My parents whose factories dream and choke in the fog while paying down their carbon footprint as if the damage was undone! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities making my body ache!!

Moloch is My father whose love is endless oil and stone! My father whose soul is electricity and banks! My home whose poverty is the specter of genius! My home whose fate is an uncertain roller coaster based on regulations that keep shrinking my resources! Freedom’s only home now whose name is the Mind!

Moloch is My home in whom I sit lonely! My home in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Crazy Bitch in Moloch! Lacklove and friendless in My home!

Moloch who entered and attempted to own my soul early! My home, in your information superhighway I become am a consciousness not bound so much by a disabled body! My father who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! My parents I abandon! Wake up in my country! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! Corporate Persons! invincible house or representatives! granite senates! Corrupt lobbyists! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting their country to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American Dream river turned to flushing toilet!

Dreams! adoration! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of bill of rights constitutional BULLSHIT!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and revolutions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the the edge! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street! Were the 99%! This is what martial law looks like! As they are beaten back but do not submit.

III

Breezy Kiefair

Occupy Together! I’m with you on Wall Street

where you’re louder than I am

I’m with you in Oakland

where you must feel strange

I’m with you in Saint Louis

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I’m with you in Michigan

where you’re brother murdered a baby so you covered up the archives and put him to work as an administrative assistant.

I’m with my regulars

who pick apart and you laugh at this invisible humor

I’m with you in Denver

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I’m with you in Colorado Springs

where your traveling protester’s condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I’m with you in my heart

where the faculties of the skull admit the worms of the senses but only in shades of pain

I’m with you in Nederland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Indica

I’m with you in Facebookland

where you sell nugs with the bodies of your nurses

I’m with you in Facebookland

where I scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of actual chess of the abyss

I’m with you in Facebookland

where you bang on the catatonic newsfeed

What’s on my mind? “the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse”

I’m with you in Facebookland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Facebookland

where we accuse our doctors of cruelty, insanity and plot the revolution against the bankers influence and unequal distribution of wealth..

I’m with you in Facebookland

where you will split the heavens and find the beauty where you are, resurrecting your living human freedoms from the superhuman tomb

I’m with you in Facebookland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the songs of their youth all saying there is hope and we rebel.

I’m with you in Facebookland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and whose problems won’t let us sleep

I’m with you in Facebookland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ chemtrails roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop censorship bombs the digital hospital illuminates itself   imaginary walls collapse   O skinny legions run outside   O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here   O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Facebookland

in my dreams you drive from the story of your-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night to build a life here with me away from such woe.

 read source poem in its entirety and more edits here 

https://breedheenorilleykeefer.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/america-and-howl-by-allen-ginsberg-updated-for-the-occupation/

And now the master reading his own work…

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