WEBVTT

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From time to time,
poets do show up.

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Keats showed up in
the new manuscript.

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And it's easy to identify,
I think, with Walt Whitman.

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Because it's easy to
identify a poet who

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spent his whole life writing
the same book over and over.

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It's a stage of life.

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I thought it would
never end for a while.

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And now he's dead,
and he's gone to hell.

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And I believe he's
still writing it.

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And this is his postscript
to Song of Myself.

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It's called,
"Whitman's Confession:

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In the Cleft of Eternity."

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The epigraph reads, "look for
me under your boot soles."

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"What happened
was, my last breath

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fell back on me like pins--

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the ultimates-- and my hands
flushed through my chest

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into stars.

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None of you mattered anymore.

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My nipples pointing
off the sawgrass,

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and your faces all dooryard.

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I did not wait for you long.

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When the body was gone,
there was not even perfume.

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There was a suck, like a
choir about to, and then not.

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I tell you of the cosmos--

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vast puke and scintillation.

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We do not go anywhere.

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And when my eyes studied
the catechism of the image,

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it went worm, nest, bridge,
reflection, stripe, rolling over

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into worm.

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What happened was, they struck
me with the bomb of the Buddha.

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All the multitudes
from the top of my head

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and from the rib's shoelace.

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I withered firsthand-- text,
translation, emanation, ink,

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and rag--

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into the cud of the Milky Way.

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Thrush bone and mule bone
wheeling in the dander fields.

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And through the clean
bowels of Orion,

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turning over me the blue
straight hairs of the diamond.

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Is this then a touch?

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What happened is, I lost
the animal of my likeness--

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Earth of fur, Earth
of legitimate odors,

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and of nights arm in arm.

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I no longer know who set
the woman on that road,

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or how her face can
shape to what is missing.

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I no longer know that
the clasp of a man

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is the cuttle of my vibrations,
or that the lapidary

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of distances is memory.

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Or that milk is cold.

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You will not find
me in any energy--

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the tender, the gross, the
metastasized, the skittish,

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the throttling, the angelic.

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I hit the void running, and
it was easy to betray you.

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I could not wait for you.

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The poem was the god who
only yearned to fuck alone."

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Stay tuned.

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