I have an entirely clichéd adoration of Ginsberg’s
Howl
. I remember spending the winter of 2009 in a state of undirected euphoria. Somehow whenever I stepped out into the Berlin snow — unusually long-lasting that year, giving the streets a kind of crisp unreality — it was this poem rattling around in my head. It was the perfect reflection of a certain mood in me, in the city, in the communities I was ricocheting between. Tangled, manic, anguished, hopeful, terrified, frustrated and frustrating, and above all energetically, forcefully intense.
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
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
Here’s the full thing.