'Frisco

 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


Howl, Allen Ginsberg