The poem originated as a voice recording that Ginsberg made with a tape recorder while traveling across the Midwest. He composed it spontaneously, dictating the words into the recorder as they came to him. In transcribing the poem, Ginsberg arranged the lines by the natural pauses and dictation in his recordings, according to the "organic space-timing" that they provided. Throughout the poem, Ginsberg contrasts images of the Midwest (and, in particular, the Kansan landscape) with snippets of news reports about the war, and links the violence there with the political conservatism of the Heartland, decrying Carrie Nation's work in Wichita, Kansas as beginning "a vortex of hatred that defoliated the Mekong Delta. The poem also uses images focusing on the sensuality and intimacy of the human body to humanize the violence of the war. The title reflects Ginsberg's interest in Eastern religions.