“Howl II”

[Editor's note: line breaks added by popular request]
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
pudgy hysterical naked but for tweed jackets and corduroy
pants and health shoes, dragging themselves through the
Viennese streets at dawn looking for a parking space
near the dentist’s, angelheaded hipsters with thinning grey hair
burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo
in the machinery of night and hoping to get this root canal
finished in time to get to the office without getting in too big of trouble,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and with a
stomachache from bad organic bratwurst had sat up until after midnight
the previous night in the supernatural darkness of nice family houses
floating across the tops of quaint Austrian villages contemplating
jazz and overdrawn bank accounts, who bared their
brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan
angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated and vomiting kitties drag-
ging half-dead birds into the house and letting them get away and having
to catch the fucking damn birds and put them back outside to the
consternation of the cats,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war but mostly chasing women and getting
impossibly drunk on vodka and lemonade and spraying graffitti on
university buildings that seemed embarassing the next day and
luckily didn’t get caught, who were not expelled from the academies
for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull
because publishing, eh, not so easy,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and various bars and
listening to the Terror through the wall,
but most of all really,
really wanting to get this root canal over with
only to hear the blank-eyed moth-woman behind the reception desk
say those crazy-making words,
“Oh, Mr. Miguel? 8.00 this morning? But you’re not in our computer”
and she’s not responsible and the responsible woman will be here in a minute
and so call the wife on the cell and bitch for a while until the woman comes
and she comes and gets told off to no avail and wait two hours?
Come back another day? “I have things to do, Mohammedan angels to meet”
and she says, “So next Monday this time?”
then the clear-eyed, clean-faced smooth-shaven dentist shows up
and is all friendly and gets a few trailings of anger and a
snotty “See you Monday” and it’s back to the Dobl