 So I read Howell last year for those of you who work here, and it's interesting because last year the reason I chose Howell I think in part was because I was still connected with it. So this year I told a story of undiagnosed mental illness, homesickness, a feeling of disenfranchisement and I guess a feeling of weakness, not being able to do anything about the society I was living in and not feeling empowered to do anything about the things I was seeing in my society. And I feel like today as I read this after serving a year as Green Body President and now having an incredible job as a field organizer for Florida, Montana, I finally feel like somebody who is empowered to make the world a better place. So, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by magnets starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel headed 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, sad of smoking and the supernatural presence of cold water flasks floating across the tops of cities contemplating gas. Who barred their hands to heaven under the L and some marauded angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated. Who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes, hallucinating Arkansas and lake-light tragedy among the scholars of war. Who were expelled from the academic academy for crazy and publishing obscene votes on the windows of the skull. Who powered and owned shaven rooms and underwear burning their money in waste baskets and loosened them to the terror through the wall. Who got busted in their public beers returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York. Who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Valley. Death or purgatory their torsos night after night. With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls. Incomparable line streets of shattering cloud and lightning in the mind, leaping toward poles of Canada and Patterson, illuminating all the motionless world of time. Pay-O-E solanies of halls, backyard green-tree cemetery dons, wine drunkenness over the rooftop storefront boroughs of T-head Georgia and Neon. Blinking traffic lights, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter desks of Brooklyn, Ashken, Rantings and Time King Light of Mind. Who chained themselves as subways for the endless ride and battering of Holy Bronze on Benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shattering, all night, mouth-wracked and battered bleak of rain, all drained of brilliance in the drear light of the zoo. Who sang all night, in summering line of pickers floated out and sat through the stale fear afternoon in desolate bodies, listening to the craft of doom on a hydrogen bar. Who talked continuously, 70 hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge. A lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the steeps of fire escapes off window sills off Empire State out of the moon. Yaffety yaffy screaming, vomiting, whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball picks and shocks at hospitals and jails and wars. Whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes. Mead for the synagogue cast on the pavement who vanished into nowhere Zen, New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall. Suffering eastern sweats and tangerine bone brandings and migraines of China under junk withdrawal in New York's bleak furnished rooms. Who wandered around and around at midnight in the rail yard wondering where to go and went leaving no broken hearts. Who lit cigarettes in boxcars, boxcars, boxcars raffling through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night. Who studied Plotonia's Po, St. John of the Cross, Telepathy, and Bacavala because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas. Who loomed it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary Indian angels who were visionary Indian angels. Who thought they were only mad when Baltimore believed in supernatural ecstasy. Who jumped in limousines with the cinnamon of Oklahoma on the impulsive winter midnight streetlight small town rain. Who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking sex or jazz or soup and followed the brilliant Spaniards to the verse about America and eternity, a hopeless task and so took ship to Africa. Who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago. Who reappeared on the west coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets. Who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic de Paco haze of capitalism. Who distributed super-communist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down and wailed down a wall and the same Staten Island theory also wailed. Who broke down crying and white genesiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons. Who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in police cars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking catastrophe and intoxication. Who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waiting for generals and manuscripts. Who let themselves be fucked in the ass by safely motorcyclists and screamed with joy. Who blew and were blown by the humans to wreathe them into sailors caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love. Who balled in the morning in the evenings and rose gardens in the grass with public parks and cemeteries. Scattering freely to whomever found living. Who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a saw behind a partition in a Turkish bath. When the blonde and naked angel came to pierce them with a sword. Who lost their love voice to the three old shrews of fate. And the one eye shrew of the heterosexual dollar. And the one eye shrew that winks out of the womb. And the one eye shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snips the intellectual golden breads of the Creston's loom. Who copulated a static and insatiated with a bottle of beer, a sweetheart, a package of cigarettes, a candle, and fell off the bed and continued along the floor and down the hall. And they did fainting on the wall with the vision of ultimate cunt. And then come alluding the last rids on the consciousness. Who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset and were red-eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise. Blushing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake. Who went out pouring for Colorado and mirrored still in nightcars. And see secret hero of these poems, Coxman and Adonis of Denver, joy to the memory of his innumerable lathes of girls in the locks and diner at dark moving houses. Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in time and space through images juxtaposed and tracked. The archangel of the soul from the two visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of patter of nevitance, alternative unity. To recreate the syntax, the measure of poor human pro is examined before you speechless and intelligent and shaping with shame. Rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head. The madman bum and angel beat in time, unknown yet putting down here what might be left to say in time from after death. And rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band, blue the suffering of America's naked mind for love. Into an illa illa, lama lama, savagatana, saxophone, pride that shivered the city's sound to the last of radio. With the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies, good to eat a thousand years.