“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…”
— howl, by allen ginsberg
it was almost practically an honest-to-god fact …
(all the older cool guys confirmed it)
& we could all recite all those well-known anecdotes
seething with that rebel-without-a-cause wildness,
the same walk-on-the-wild-side jazz we’d seek out in
the breathless teen-angst movies like
joy ride… & party crashers:
“a single aspirin swigged down
with a mouthful of coca-cola
will render you staggeringly,
knocked-on-your-ass drunk”
one medicine show demonstration: a normally
“sober” & “respectable” older kid rapidly developing
outrageously slurred speech patterns & flopping with
histrionic helplessness on the playground lawn
where he was reduced to a giggling,
gravity-pinned, dying cockroach
impaled on its back: proof-positive!
so later, in the sanctuary of my room,
after surreptitiously gulping down the
deliciously-illicit white pill with a glass of Coke
(which, as anyone could tell you, can completely
dissolve a steel spike left in it over night!)
& waiting over an hour for the magic…
nothing… happened!
boy, was i ever pissed! it was just like that time
I swallowed the chokecherries & drank the
glass of milk, which everybody swore
would kill you… but it never did.
it just tasted bad.
i didn’t even get sick!
I thought, face it:
there’s no magic in this world—
only lies
NEARING THE END OF THE LINE 