A naked lunch is natural to us, we eat reality sandwiches But allegories are so much lettuce. Don’t hide the madness.

In these lines Ginsberg contrasts unvarnished experience (“naked lunch,” “reality sandwiches”) with the softening, decorative function of allegory (“so much lettuce”). The diction is deliberately comic and bodily, suggesting that art and speech should not prettify or dilute what is raw, painful, or socially taboo. “Don’t hide the madness” reads as an aesthetic and ethical imperative: acknowledge psychic extremity, desire, and cultural sickness rather than masking them with polite symbolism. The passage aligns with Beat-era commitments to candor, anti-censorship, and direct testimony—valuing immediacy over literary indirection and insisting that the truth of lived experience, however unsettling, is more nourishing than safe metaphor.