Howl

Jesus, I mean howl to me sounds like my mom making drugs seem like the worst thing in the world, and how it will make you eat "fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine" and the talking all the time, "a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon"
"yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars". anyways i should stop this poem because it really just aggravates me. To be honest, I drink and I used to smoke, hell I would even say I had an addiction, but damn... this makes anything that a normal person might go through as light and not an issue. I mean it really pisses me off reading this for multiple reasons. Yes, it can be this bad, I went to an AA meeting for a class at Clemson and that was on of the more heavy things I've done in my life. to listen to real people with real problems describe their issues. Reading this it is like taking every persons stories from AA and putting them together. I just don't see the heart. I feel more or less insulted by this. I mean yes people can go off the deep end and end up having some amazing, and scary times in their life. and yes drinking and doing drugs can put you in a bad situation. but this poem, well like i said just pisses me off... I wish I would be in class tomorrow to discuss it... I mean argue all you want that you shouldn't do this to your body, and that you can't see clearly when you are high and then tell that to some of the musicians that wrote this amazing music while on drugs and their imagination that allowed that sort of exploration of their thoughts. I mean yes everything has a dark side but a lot of things have a light side too.... ok some of the harder drugs i don't get. but this poem is also about the lighter drugs and alcohol abuse that happens.... again this poem just really gets me pissed off, just takes the worst of everything and write a poem about it... yeah good idea

A dog can be a terrible creature,
who shits on your carpet and howls till morning,
who always wants your attention even when you're sick,
who can't even feed itself,
who never will let itself out,
who bite the neighbor and then ran when you called
.....

see you write something like that and now all dogs are killers and disobedient. everything has negative associated with them, but come on I didn't know how if you just cried in your room and could be terribly negative towards something that you'd come up with a piece of "art" that was "classic." Yes he had an issue with drugs, but where did he write about the good things he did on them, that is the one we should of read contrary to Howl, I mean obviously Supermarket In California, is about a hallucinogenic episode he was having, and he loved Whitman's work,
He is referring to America as becoming a supermarket, too commercialized, to much into material items. You know America is moving more towards that everyday, the commercialism, and losing touch with nature and I think that this is what the poem is trying to get at... but their is no way he was sober righting this... not that I have a problem with that I just see him kinda dreaming this up in a state (if i'm not mistaken Whitman wrote about a lot of nature right).. But anyways I enjoyed this poem a lot more then Howl, I mean i'm into a more upbeat poem and I felt that he wrote this when he was trying to fight conformity being a member of the Beat Generation and not "bashing it" like i feel he was doing in Howl