Posted by MacGregor on July 18, 2002 at 11:40:15:
I saw the best beers of my generation destroyed, drank by mad thirst, hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the wisconson streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, Rat bastards 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 lakes fish fry. Doating across the tops of cities contemplating mead, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs with great mugs of barleywine, who cowered in unshaven splendor, in cast-iron underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Chicago with a belt of marijuana, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank barleywine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night, with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of pale ale, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, mead drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring summer dusks of Iron River, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to wagonwheels for the endless ride of truth until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of dawn.