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.