Walt Whitman

Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs,

Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons,

Voices of the interminable generations of slaves,

Through me many long dumb voices,

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

I speak the password primeval .... I give the sign of democracy;

Through me the afflatus surging and surging .... through me the current and index.

And whatever I do or say I also return.

Whoever degrades another degrades me .... and whatever is done or said returns at last to me,

Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Unscrew the locks from the doors!

No sentimentalist .... no stander above men and women or apart from them .... no more modest than immodest.

Disorderly fleshy and sensual .... eating drinking and breeding,

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,

And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that plot and conspire.

And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipped,

And go on the square for my own sake and for others’ sakes,

I am less the reminder of property or qualities, and more the reminder of life,

The facts are useful and real .... they are not my dwelling ....I enter by them to an area of the dwelling.

Gentlemen I receive you, and attach and clasp hands with you,

This is the geologist, and this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.

These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,

This is the lexicographer or chemist .... this made a grammar of the old cartouches,

Fetch stonecrop and mix it with cedar and branches of lilac;

Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!

A word of reality .... materialism first and last imbueing.

One time as good as another time .... here or henceforward it is all the same to me.

A word of the faith that never balks,

And mine a word of the modern .... a word en masse.

Endless unfolding of words of ages!

The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.

What behaved well in the past or behaves well today is not such a wonder,

There is no better than it and now.

This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,

Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.

Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,

Witnesses of us .... one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,

I step up to say that what we do is right and what we affirm is right .... and some is only the ore of right,

Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be worked over and rectified?

Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?

I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

My gait is no faultfinder’s or rejecter’s gait,

Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me .... I stand indifferent,

What blurt is it about virtue and about vice?

Washes and razors for foofoos .... for me freckles and a bristling beard.

And am not the poet of goodness only .... I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.

I am the poet of commonsense and of the demonstrable and of immortality;

Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?

I am he attesting sympathy;

Extoler of amies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.