Prompt: Take a long poem and shred the lines creating a brand new poem. I took a small section of Howl because it is one of the most epic pieces of writing that I’ve ever read and I thought it would be fun it mess with it a little bit.
Howl by Ginsberg
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 cool eyes hallucinating Arkan- sas 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, 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,
My Erased Version
I saw the best naked, angelheaded hipsters
starry hollow-eyed and high
smoking supernatural, floating,
contemplating jazz, staggering
on tenement roofs
radiant cool eyes among the scholars of war,
crazy on the windows of the skull,
unshaven in underwear,
burning their Terror
busted hotels
in Paradise Alley,
night after night with cock
and endless blind shuddering
leaping toward
illuminating all the Time between, –
aislingdoherty.com 