Walt

Walt, I’m searching for you

On roads thick with Civil War dead

Among men and rotting limbs

Ink on your sleeves, bleeding truth

Your soft, naked footsteps 

Cold baths and scruffy thoughts

Said something they didn’t like

What virtue disgust may call

Savoring a breath on summer’s day

A playwright visits as if to say

We dog men need to keep barking

Tails wagging won’t do

I heard your 1890 voice on the Internet

I heard your 1890 voice on the fucking Internet!

Reading some lines of your own work

For reals dog...for reals!

My gold-leafed edition of Leaves 

Didn’t come with me on this trip I’m taking

Instead I surreptitiously downloaded it 

On tarmac as flight prepared to take off

They can’t reach us now

Can’t stop our words or change who we are

This American experiment breeding all manner of 

Defiance in the face of absurd convention

I saw the bullet pass your head 

And the next hit your side

Bloody samskara wounding 

Yet only making you stronger

The words of men cut as surely as knives

Absorbed by waves of emotion withstanding

While disturbed men with guns slay the voiceless

Leaving no road home for innocence

I don’t recognize this American dream of altered

States and anger disguised as mental illness 

Carving it’s way from one gun barrel to the next

A virus of instability preying on trusting souls

The “delicious singing of mother” to young America

Is gone by — now — turned to weeping families and

Workers unknowing of their future 

While deceitful Predator spreads poison confections

Your song to the President still resounding:

“...behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces”

Internal flames burning to be heard and loved

Calling to advance the spirit of a people

200 years past your cradle 

Your 19th-century whiteness infects the woke 

Who call for cancelation of your poetic fathership

Based on a stain of African American deprecation

While I have dismissed you for years for far less

I’m finding you now, again, like a warm coal unturned

Imperfections no less meaningful, yet brash and biting

A piece of us as sure as Malcolm, Martin, and Abraham

On earthly sprouts of grass did you find

The tender edge of enlightenment

Equal among all and ever growing anew

As in God, country, and senses full of life

Nothing held back, your impressions exploding

Carries me like a time machine into your world 

Where I smell the hay, the streets, and the life

Teeming into your consciousness unfettered

I feel your embrace of the universe

Knowing what would come, and consuming

All in all, with abandon and nothing held back

A pure moment of bliss and higher Nature.