Labyrinth

the hornless minotaur in the ochre room
exhausted, trapped in boneless skin
the balding bitches licking his heels
him begging for release, to kill
a tourist passing through

the yellow birch stands smooth
and bronzed smelling like oil of wintergreen
the small black marks and scars
on his matured bark grow in the shade
of all those provincial hedges

the sacrificial virgins are being led away
from the threshold
with paralyzed gazes and spaghetti legs
abducted into the borderland
cutting corners
transforming themselves on the cold stone
defying classification
until the center is reached

Howl

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 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 jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

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, alcohol and cock and endless balls

Allen Ginsberg, Howl, part I lines 1-12