"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machiner of night,
...who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
...who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borscht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
...who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
...ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time--
...to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking 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 come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years."

From Alan Ginsberg's Kaddish for his mother Naomi:

Recounting that when she went in and out of asylums, her husband Louis and sons Alan and Eugene were left alone: "...so broke his life in two and paid for Law -- read huge blue books and rode the ancient elevator 13 miles away in Newark & studied up hard for the future
just found the Scream of Naomi on his failure doorstep, for the final time, Naomi gone, us lonely -- home -- him sitting there --
Then have some chicken soup, Eugene."

Recounting how Naomi told him of serving God a bowl of soup: "...I try he said--That's all he could do, he looked tired.
He's a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup."

"The Essence of Existence
is Buddhahood --
As a Buddha
you know
that all the sounds
that wave from a tree
and the sights
from a sea of fairies
in Isles of Blest
and all the tastes
in Nectar Soup... --
one dinner"

Gary Snyder's "How to Make Stew in the Pinacate Desert: Recipe for Locke & Drum"

Gregory Corso's "A Dreamed Realization:

"Life. It was Life jabbed a spoon in their mouths.
Crow jackal hyena vulture worm woke to necessity
--dipping into Death like a soup."

David Meltzer's "Revelation":

"It comes to this:
my teacup filled with steaming green tea.
Basho sits beside me with ohashi,
waiting for Reiko to bring out
the Nikku Nabe, the sake, some Kirin Beer...."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower":

"And finally after everyone who was anyone and after
everyone who was no one had arrived and after every soul was seated and waiting for
the symbolic mushroom soup to be served and for the keynote speeches to begin
The President himself came in
Took one look around and said
We resign"

Robert Creeley's "Soup"...dedicated to Mike and Joanna:

"Trembling
with delight--
mind takes forms

from faces,
finds
happiness

delicious..."

Robert Creeley's "Sopa":

"That old black goober that I ate
for lunch. Something in the bowl it was,

at the edge, up-
ended. Like when one

cracks one
peanut, how ever

to throw it away how-
ever dusty?"