Before I was born, Alan Ginsberg was howling over the best minds of his generation. Decades come and go - changing the flavors, but not the essence. Throughout, howling remains ineffective as a change agent.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by ambition, gluttony calculated clothed,
pushing themselves through the corporate offices at midnight avoiding a
lost dollar,
demonheaded charisma freezing the ancient heavenly connection to
the starry dynamo in the rhetoric of reason,
who riches and suits and clear-minded and lucid exercised in
the natural light of warm-water peaks soaring amidst the
bottoms of clouds ignoring outcome,
who covered their souls from Heaven on the El and ignored Mohammedan
demons marching on church steeples in shadow
who went through Ivy League with bleary tired eyes envisioning
New York and Wall Street success for the self-made,
Who were excelled to academia for clear facts & figures
in prominent journals of noteworthy brainiacs,
Who strutted in top floor penthouses in white fluffy robes, their money gaining
interest in IRA accounts and ignoring the whispering why,
Who covered their adulteries with civilized finery informing
the offspring it wasn’t their fault,
The innocent disbelieving rose reincarnate in the familiar ghostly clothes of
eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani
Tuneless with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own
bodies good to eat a thousand years.
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