The Howl 1856 -2016
“Who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear ...*
Henry Cook was a proud man, not one to cower.
It took a lot to get him down, yet having not a penny left,
sold his wife and son for a shilling at Croyden Market.
When that was spent, he sold his soul to Effingham.**
Bone crushing he could do and well, sucking marrow
from rotting bones, bashing those who dared to fight
for the freshest lot, and feared for being caught.
But on a day like any other, rooted to a wooden bench,
beating up those bones, he howled.
"who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals, …
Oscar Wilde in Reading gaol, made to pay for sodomy,
broken dreams of decadence, blue china, golden rings,
embalmed in the darkness of Cellblock C,
a last psalm to a lover, his howl in silence sealed.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness …
Kerouac’s streaming lines, open spaces closing in,
Morrison on a high in Paris, springtime and heroin,
Basquait spraying boxcars with mischievous mystique,
lost their voices on the dark side of the sun.
"where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses ...
See the young men come and go, unaware of Michelangelo,
they’re banging on the neighbor's door, thinking less and wanting more.
Outside, the coyote howls, caught in the maze of the city lights below.
He's starving, out of room and out of time, and he's not afraid of you.
-Marge Simon
*lines from Ginsberg’s “Howl”
Effingham Workhouse, one of many, where the howl began three centuries ago.
the workhouse howl, when no fight is left in a man, and nothing's to be done about it.
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