I sing the body electric.
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them.
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, and dis-corrupt them and charge them full with the charge of the soul. Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman. The womb, the tits, nipples, breast milk, tears, laughter, weeping,love looks, love prodavations and risings. The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud. Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep. Walking, swimming, poise on the hips. Weeping, reclining, embracing, arm curving and tightening. The continual change of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes the skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair. The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked need of the body. The circling rivers, the breath and breathing it in and out. The beauty of the waist and thence of the hips and thence downward towards the knees.
The thin red jellies within you or within me. The bones and the marrow and the bones, the exquisite realization of health.
Oh I say, these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul. Oh I say now, these are the soul.
[ 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 machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares… Howl by Allen Ginsberg]
And so, from being created in his likeness to being banished for wanting to be too much like him, we were cast out, and the garden of Eden transformed into the garden of evil. Los Angeles, the city of angels, the land of gods and monsters. The in-between realm where only the choices made from your free will, will decide your souls final fate. Some poets called it the entrance to the underworld, but on some summer nights it could feel like paradise, paradise lost.
izzy806
snowghoul
jbbartram-illu
blakekathryn
2087
