"who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be f***ed in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom- ever come who may"

This poem isn't the first piece of literature that discusses sex between men. Still, sodomy was not just shocking but also very illegal in many states across the U.S. during the 1950s. To boot, this uses a bunch of very taboo language to talk about that sex act.

Why drive home his point with such explicit language? Well, cuss words are a tool—like a giant sledgehammer. They're used not just for shock, but to bust apart what is considered acceptable literary language.

And besides, what was obscene and illegal to some people was just dinner and a movie to Ginsberg. He wrote about gay sex because he didn't think his personal life should be silenced in public spaces. Now, sometimes, when people don't listen, you have to shout. Ginsberg chose to howl.

In this piece, Ginsberg describes how "the greatest minds of his generation" are losing, um, their minds. The Beats adopted an attitude toward society that was all, treat me like I'm crazy and I'll act crazy. He and his buddies "burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism."

The Beats used the descriptions of these obscene acts as a type of resistance to the hyper-capitalism of the period. The violent and sexual language in this poem is a literary weapon that launches an all-out attack on the sensibilities of the upper class.

Predictably, the powers that be responded with a lawsuit. Too bad they lost. Suckers.

This is free verse at it finest. There's no set rhyme scheme or regular meter (like iambic pentameter, that Old Scoundrel). Whitman gave birth to this style a hundred years earlier, but Ginsberg took free verse to new heights—or new lows, depending on your point of view.

In case you didn't notice, the wild poetic romp above is a single sentence. Ginsberg just put his (highly irreverent) words wherever he wanted to. He even threw in a hefty handful of f-bombs to make his point stick.