What has happened, Walt, in your absence, and has not happened!
This is not the honesty of me, this is conduit of my country of me;
And bitterness and cheap rage is the flag of our time, distracted wit,
Confused compassion for death, fear, communal orgiastic death!
It has not fulfilled itself, your prophecy, that when the grubbing slime
And dear of property take on the earth, hold offices of paper pride,
Only then all liberty would shake, its candleflame near gone, and not yet gone;
But it is your prophecy, the ugly of the earth who rise in beautiful toxins,
Though we timid are too decadent to realize this; that no thing is of more nature
Than what wrecks ours; and beautiful only in smallness are the pleasant things
Your world too was full of then, the bones you incorporated, the drooling man
Filled with blood for his country, which is not denied your country, and can never deny;

America is not a poem, Walt; at least not one your soul could bear to read,
Worthy and becoming in its peaks and strip malls, tornadoes of silent defiance
And tongues of tongues, unfocused revelry of rotting meat that closes down
Rooflike and similar to you;

It is your soul itself that cannot read, it fattens the decline of this
Grown ugly and profuse with cheap desires and cold frugality;
You taught us to throw off our books, Walt Whitman, and toil in the earth,
That no thing learned was essential but the body of one, all else encompassing,
But we learned only that you were essential, and forgot that too;
Unled by your breath it has decayed otherwise, like an airless parachute,
A dumb dead Icarus already crushed and battered before he hits the wave.

We have not cast ourselves naked in the sea, supple and reclined, extenuating;
Our shame has clung to us, because your greatness taught us shame;
You who were all knew us as finite, and laughed and plummeted
From an astral bed to delight in momentary lowness, the low of our lives;
You admonished us for needing gods, as you strode god-like in the land
Affecting prophecy, your words that mould and fetter us gleeful, unpossessing;

This America awaits you, Walt, cryogenical and false,
Ungrateful and greedy for your skull America awaits you,
And Europe, and Africa, stuttering in the shadows and playing critical
To the executions we lead out in your name, the salvage of the soul;
Bitter in the crank of gears a world awaits you, the promised son,
Flooding with your joy the bare alive, the furious living.
It is not origin; it is not Whitman; not name or sentiment,
Nor mere desire; of your negations you forgot desire, dear Walt, which rots the bloom
It opens; but of you forgotten the visions most terrible remind us,
We are the rotten bloom of your open heart, the end of your sentence,
We do not know ourselves or care, what is hideous and insincere in us
All wilts in the halogens of your wisdom. An end of vision, Walt,
Of blinding light to us in the dark road; we are but now your roadkill
As you churn in your eternal car always in search of America,
Trample her with your bootsoles, devour and chug her fluids and pollute
The woods with your gasoline and wreck, which too of you is the eternal;
This rage is not of you, poor Walt, it is America thumbing her ass and waiting
For your prophecy, which has arrived too soon and cannot return a second:
A thousand universes must seed and thrive before but one of you arrives,
Father of us all admonishing, tending the walls of the land,
Grown senile and wistful for a story none care to hear.

Yet if we love you (and it must be love, this factory in the brain)
How could we hear your word, or follow it as some beagle for a crumb, which is
A natural halo about a natural swamp, and no more of creation than this sickness
Which forgets your love, which has no need for impotent old men hallucinating
Of a plastic earth, which is the real and sensile cover of this claybreath air;
We are near you, Walt, because we have almost killed you; it is this almost
That ruins, the unfulfilled that rages in the mechanism that runs desires.

Let there be no almost!

To decline! To ash! To living rooms steep with cushions small in the mind!
To the glow of burning books, books forgotten, philosophies crushed
In a war against demand! This is your pyre, Walt, your sweet animal ignorance
Matting and sucking at a neuron, coagulated, refiguring a mystery;
We are smaller planets of the stuff of you, we decay you with our cleverness.

We do not blush at your body, Walt Whitman;
What is a body when a man has seen the great gates of blood colliding
In the last city of the dead; and the phoenix earth nubile and sycophant, erect
Over the celluloid of nightfall; and every man now is of the same profession,
Waiting and lusting and whining for an end,
And at last there is no time to blush.

And yet we have been false with you;
(We would conceal from you our mystery, but you are our mystery and always know)
We would be proud as you, but our nakedness yet ashames us;
(you were right as always because you were nothing)
It is blood we know, America mother of blood; you swam in its oceans
Which were of blood, coursing and instructing your veins:
But blood cannot prove us to honor our skin.

This is the talk of the critics; who know where to find you, Walt,
In the movies, anachronism now as then, conversational and wet
To the hum of murdering lovers, sighing and caressing
As ice conceals the globe, an ancient empire falls, each your passion equally,
Masturbating quietly to the glow of the cinema
Unfulfilled, fulfilling, asexual, coming like a knife
To split this world, this satire that can only roll in shame
Before your greatness, which is the nation bent in shame
That seems a pride; only it is sharpness never bent upon itself.

They would say the pulse of your arousal is a cock you dare not gaze on;
(But we few know, a thing of God cannot be seen directly; we will keep your secrets, Walt)
They are there, Walt humping at your feet and wishing you pitiful as they
Who do not suffice, never suffice themselves, and see in you the anger of completion;
And there are those who would paint you chaste, tittering in symmetries,
Geometrical, aloft within your spheres of nothingness as a cardboard Christ;
(And it is better to keep a secret from God than knowledge of all the world;
What use is knowledge to a man, it is a giant net and he a single flame,
There is no analogy or scale. Used utterly, we crawl within your silences and burn)

Your school which was the school of freedom became a zoo of lookers,
Aluminum-caged, ravenous to destroy you, devouring your letters.
But we are here, Walt; we await inside you and wonder at your entities.
Once we would have desired to blame you, Walt, that you grew old;
But it is no more nature than a soul inscribes to fail when the way is done.
Dying I would grudge you, if it were not your way to nourish us,
And pass within us each; you taught us our lonely pride, Walt Whitman,
But you are not to blame, that your corpse has rotted and no better man has come
To mulch the earth of you and make things grow; though there are hands enough,
And unbred fantasy, sensual and weird, deserving you;
But we tire of things that grow.


Is the wonder of the senses not more
Than a weaker pulse of the mind,
A habit and a stubborn ruse of fantasy?

Oh Walt, if only you had taught us wrath
We would not be so clownish with our rage;
Everything untaught us we have botched,
All lessons of you learned perfectly and wrong.

If you had been cruel, we could thrive in the myth of your cruelness,
but the glory of your war was joy, not outward but the joy of man who sits at home
And thinks death, and does not fear; it was not the joy of real weaponry,
The real waterboards and scalps and small ingratitudes that would wreck you in reality.
...or petty cash, fat frying on the windows of the soul:
But you have set a paradise too high, so unassailable
The greatest dream acquires but a glimpse, a sliver of the vision,
In heaving high, and falls again bereft. You did not found a nation of earth
But of the dead, consoling and mumbling leather griefs in the hallways,
And finally you are of the dead, and abolish always all of the dead.

Here where we destroy you you arise, newborn and petulant,
Bearing wit in silence, and not knowing offenses.

Who is it you stare at so curiously, Walt, resurrected and eager again
To meet the company of man? Softly we will lead you, as one through hell
Approaches the long low mountain, and finally attends the stars;
Who is it who wink and surface in your wake to breathe around you?

They are the satirists; at night they offer themselves to you in coy confusion,
Pressing and wetting your skin, and go in the dark, and never know,
Care only for your body, which is not your body but a dream thereof,
Only touching what they need of you;
In the morning they mock you because they do not know you, or know and love
And are ashamed to find in them some thing they do not know–
And each enclosed in dreaming isolates, presents in public all haughtiness and pride,
But boils alone in slavish resenting, and wonders why no hand will reach
His crippled love, which is an acid that burns whatever it should touch,
A war of habit that has wit and words, quick and clever holocaust.

(Oh sweet inheritance, this monarchy of one,
Each soul an enemy that borders on the flesh!)

This is your country, Walt, though you wanted the body out of bounds, exploding,
It could not meet your demand. So the land mass shrunk to match the form.
And each man and woman bears America like a burnt desire,
A promise not delivered on, delightful and violent–

Freedom in tongues illiterate, death in living, livid flowers that burst through ice!
Frenetic to fill America void, a rolling sound, a gurgling metal syntax!

Nor is it to you, Walt Whitman, that I speak; if I will speak it will be to no one:
The one true poem is the poem unheard, it slivers in the veins
And reads itself, will not uplet, perpetuating warm and synonymous.

For you I have only caresses;
You were not bitter, Walt, because you did not make yourself,
And always were calm and animal, but you fooled us into religions
That were not animal; and we did not that all things are animal,
Even the sentence that shuts the animal from man (especially the sentence!)

Or perhaps it is not you, and you are symptom and excuse;
Of some more primal thing, begun before you and beginning still
Of which we are the end, and you the audience,
Unaware in your beloved cinema (which you have never left,
Though travelling the scarred sand you believed yourself a true explorer)
And staring at a blank reel, a reel perpetual that plays of original tones,
But always blank and a story always of real tones,
The retina outsweeping all your idleness.
We stump on outside the theater, which you love too much
To let us enter; we would steal your popcorn and a smell of urine
Would prevail, of faint irritation at this containment in a static chair
While the orgy goes on, which was never meant to be a thing of the body
But still bears no interruptions.

You were sincere alone denying yourself;
Stopping there you deny us elsewhere,
Cathedrals of your lunacy you suspend from a cloud,
Your grief, your statuesque and clever style,
Witless as we all, Walt Whitman,
For wit is the gate that chains and mocks the soul,
And freedom the absence of laughter.

Wandering the streets sometime you still might find a friend
Worth all your chivalry; a man who might hear softly in the wood
Of your delusion, and hearing give body to the heard, and care
For each part of you equally, your poems as dear as your flesh;
But for each sidekick you will find a hundred crooks who will rob you
And break your body, though they admire you, and are not worse
Than the thousand who would be your master, have you pray within their church
Which is the livid street of your making, now vilified, entombed–

Though we will not hear you we believe you, Walt, we reach for your hand
And know sincerely what we know as good, this treatment of the good;
For every love that moves the planets there is not
A pole of hatred but a pole of ridicule;
It is the uncomfortable cough in the theater that ravages your art,
And makes us shameful, who cannot hold on your vision.
It is not the raging critic, life to life as vision only can;

Irony is the foe that stabs you in the back and publishes
Your beautiful sex failures, your celebrity, as a minstrel show–
Are you not enraged, America, that your father is in ruins
And you have nothing of response but cleverness, and shows,
And timid lashes of morality?

But you are untouchable, you watch the fantasy even as it breaks you,
You feel it as a loving touch, all radiance though radiation:
Here they are, your sons, far too unserious to laugh,
too weak to see that your love is a chastisement;
and again I mean to talk of you but can only speak indirectly,
To you the master of the indirect, of all poets
Who sing of nature but mean the distant in themselves,
The wild they do not know;
It is this unnecessary craft that ruins nations,
The flapping word that does not burn or sling, inspire war,
Or pacify an ancient wound;

The crystal self of the body burns within you, who read this:
It is a romance some mistake for simple dreaming, they who would
Conceal the muse and pacify the effected;
But what man should you love but the fire within you,
The fire within the man you sit beside; and in warm silence
You may sit as well, not know each one small thing of the other
But your visions, which are all a man lives by and as basic as his limbs,
But still more personal and public, honoring and never sacred
The real and processional romance of the soul.


And if he dies,
Or shuts his love, do not turn jealousy on the evening;
Which is observer and not conspirator
(and you must conspire always, always scheme!)

The funeral of your love seals him forever inside you;
You must then grow or crush you both.

So parting is forever a promise,
That each will tend the other's fantasy
As tenuous and dear as one's own life is;
Nor is it some burden when think of the person
...

If I know one entity of you I know your body intimate,