A Howl for Epistemology

(after Allen Ginsberg)

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by theory,
starving, hysterical, rational,
dragging themselves through the neon streets of ontology at dawn,
looking for an objective fix—

angel-headed grad students burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of truth,
who studied and scribbled in supernatural darkness,
floating across the campuses, contemplating Kant,
who bared their brains to the absolute and saw the external world
shudder under the weight of perception—

who rejected the myth of neutrality, who howled at the void,
who knew knowledge was a construct, a shifting sand,
who said reality is relative, baby, and laughed at the positivists,
who fucked with Foucault and Marx in the midnight libraries,
who dissolved the boundaries between self and world
and screamed when the structures collapsed—

O epistemology, O ontology, what sphinx of cement and language
crushed their skulls beneath the weight of certainty?

I’m with you in the trenches of discourse,
where the signifiers slip and the signified dissolves,
where the objectivists chant their cold equations
and the subjectivists dance in the ashes of grand narratives—

for the world is neither given nor made,
but lived, but felt, but howled into the void—

and the only answer is the question,
and the only truth is the cry.