for all those who've never read HOWL [2011]

Fuck Moloch, Carl Solomon, and all the angelheaded hipsters

I've not known 

the best minds of my generation     

  they have eluded me     

though     truth be told     

I was not often looking

instead

I crashed a car on a Canadian backroad in the company of an ugly motherfucker 
who was nearly seven feet tall     even with the scoliosis     and we woke up 
lost and broken in a kindly hooker's kitchen     having breakfast with two great danes 
and a mentally retarded kid named Vernon     and the eggs were runny    
and the conversation was too     and when we finally found our way back to the U.S.A.     
we scrubbed our crotches with Lindane in the Welcome Center restroom     

  and this simple behemoth probably should have made a million bucks 
body slamming other ugly motherfuckers     but     he got himself all swept up by 
the "American Dream"     fell in love with a pretty girl with big tits and got her pregnant     
and she took him for four kids and a house     and now he works 80 hours a week on 
a factory line to support her hair-do habit and infidelities

and

I used to play in a band with a dude who was completely bald by the time he was 
twenty-one     and he wore a wig when he played his pawn shop guitar in hopes of 
getting laid     (there weren't any women around)     and we never opened for anyone at 
the Token Lounge or Harpo's or played next to last at Arts Beats and Eats     but later on     
using money left to him by his deceased grandmother     he started up a porno business 
under the alias 'Don Gordo'     got himself a chubby lesbian to run camera and rented 
a cheap-ass apartment to film in     and he spent fifty thousand dollars before he realized 
he couldn't get his dick up in the presence of an actual human being     

  and now he's jobless living in the basement of the house he grew up in     and he 
spends his days listening to his mom's fat ass squeak around in the tub while he eats 
the French-bread pizzas she cooked for him     and he maintains all sorts of 
vile online relationships that keep him current with all the best in 
kiddie porn and snuff films

and 

I once lived with a guy I knew from high school     who bought his house with 
the insurance settlement from a car accident we'd been in     (yes     another car accident)     
and life was cheap and we pissed away our time watching German horror films dubbed by 
The Violent Shitters and eating 3-Cheeser Pepperoni Pleasers with heavy cajun crust     
and he was sexually satisfied by weekend "houseguests" and various internet dalliances 
until he fell in love with a guy from Tacoma     sold the house in a matter of weeks     
and left me to live in my car

  and when his Tacoma relationship went sour    he moved back here and took up with 
a Dominican drag queen named ChiChi who cheated on him and gave him H.I.V.     
which quickly became A.I.D.S.     and now     gaunt and desperate     experimental drugs 
keep him alive to work the register at a thrift store and be lonely

and

I once spent a summer with a set of teenage twins named Stacy and Tracy     a couple of 
dishwater-blonde dingbats with extensions tied on in big fat knots     and on evenings 
when they weren't working the Pussycat     we would cruise Hines Drive in my 
Eldorado Biarritz looking for someplace quiet and shady     and on one particular night     
they dropped their stockings and ate each other's pussies on a picnic table down by 
Newburgh Lake     and after Stacy was stung on the ass by a bee     and Tracy had 
cum in her mouth     I guzzled a fifth of Wild Irish Rose     did some unspeakable things     
and then threw up

  and years later     I ran into a cracked-out Tracy at CVS     and she told me how 
Stacy had been found floating face down in the tub of an abandoned house out on 
the east side     and she told me how she'd had a baby boy named Reggie who had died in 
an incubator a week after being born     and she told me that her husband had 
killed a prostitute in the back seat of their car and was doing life in Jackson for it     
and she told me she had six months to live     and she told me I was lucky

and

I knew another musician     a manic/depressive lunatic who played drums like Dave Grohl 
and kept a store of cocaine in his kick     and he and I saw a lot of stages together     
and backstages too     and one night after a gig at the Magic Stick     he shared 
a mountain of powder with the bass player from the headlining band     and after 
he'd snorted the last line     he rose from the couch he'd been sitting on     teetered there for 
just a moment with his eyes rolling back     and then plunged face first into the glass table 
in front of him     twenty-nine stitches later     his wife took him home     and he never 
played drums again

  and last December     just a couple of days before Christmas     he summoned his wife 2 sons     and dementia stricken father into the kitchen they shared     and while 
the four of them looked on     he smiled     put the barrel of a Ruger Single Six revolver 
into his mouth     and blew his brains out onto the refrigerator

and

I've still not found

the best minds of my generation

  they continue to elude me     and probably always will

but perhaps     one day

this poem will be their Howl