.

Straightaways,

Straight-edges
We see
Now
Along with
.
Our ideals,
A sun setting
Behind a truck bed
And the TV blaring
To funnel monuments
Of thought,
.
As to just see those straightaways,
To make ourselves as small as an ant
But brandishing moments with our faces to the sun
Will walk us into the new part of town,
Will mete out everything we’ve in our marrows,
In our wrists,
.
So when the lobsters
Come crawling back out for spring,
We’re new too.

Darkness, there,

Again,
As my gem-bound elixir
Turned
To something I’m afraid to know
Tells me all over
That to live is to bare teeth
Hardening like our plastic pitchers
On the surface, navy blue and white.

Morality is gone…

How else could it be,
Here giving myself into
What all along,
My parents would have wanted for me,
The joy of living,
There is no way,
NO way,
I could do unto others rightly
On this trampoline of eyes,
Eaters of moments and climbers of vines.

The problem with the phrase “my soul,” to me, is that the very essence of “soul” is interpersonal, if success is to be defined by the rate at which we help and give aid to others, so any mention of a purported personal entity the “soul” is actually an evasion of the moment — it is the absurd suggestion that a memory is more important than the rich, unprecedented, unfolding present.

Attempting to read the passage on funk in silence, in a closet by candlelight, so it would be quieter, I kept incurring damage, damage to my psyche in the form of cars, passers by, missiles like jet engines with makeshift songs, all that nothing that I’d otherwise wish I’d learned, the cadence, the rhythm of everything we are, naivetee, bowling nights, dog barkings, late newspaper deliveries and nationalistic victory chants of Macedonia.

That man,

There,
You can look at him,
Because he’s engrossed in impossibility –
The great possibility,
Which so many now alive will correctly,
So correctly,
Dialect as wedged within
A cacophony of capitalism.

Now I see that my anxiety was warranted,

With little burrowed creatures adorned by shark’s teeth
Coming out and manning platoon positions,
Wanting only for that shrapneled edge
To bring a hark to the
Night where they stand alone
Feeding the words
Of the days and numbers with horsepower.

If not for music,

It would break my heart when you stared off into the distance,
As if nothing’s going on.
.
Such would be the case of my
Baby mind
Existing within names of streets
We all left them though off the quarry
At sand hill’s median
Fleeing from truth.

Whitman was a lover of the planet. The zeal, the fervor, and the vividness take shape even more preternaturally than does his human sympathy, in poems like “IN CABIN’D SHIPS AT SEA”: “The boundless blue on every side expanding, / With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large imperious waves, / Or some some lone bark buoyed on the dense marine…” Here, Whitman gleans and vitalizes something generally seen as idle, a simple maritime scene.

The extent to which his adulation of such nature scenes is homosexual, of course, is debatable: it could just comprise a sexually nondescript “muse.” Camille Paglia, however, certainly seems to vie in favor of Whitman’s unorthodoxy: “The epic catalogs of Leaves of Grass (from which ‘To Thee Old Cause’ culls) are (Whitman’s) gluttonous self-fecundation or female swelling, a portrait of the artist as Great Mother, a Universal Man-Woman” (Sexual Personae, 602).
In generalizing here about Whitman, Paglia is probably not too far off base. The former certainly does make it his m.o. to describe, repeatedly, a seemingly arbitrary landscape, a habit with which Paglia apparently finds scruple for its lack of male involvement — interjection, initiation of the ego toward changing, morphing or affecting said surroundings. Verbosity is in no way lacking in Whitman, hence apparently what Paglia deems “swelling.” Elsewhere, of Whitman’s indiscriminate identification with manifold vistas, Paglia opines that in them, “Dionysus’ polymorphous perversity breaks down Apollonian categorization and hierarchy” (Sexual Personae, 603). What is missing, in other words, for Paglia, is selectivity — the manly power to divide right from wrong, and to emit major or minor carnage upon the ostensible weakling harmony.
“To Thee Old Cause,” though, proves that Whitman does possess a paradigm for right and wrong, with military combat’s compunction ringing true in a line like “After a strange sad war, great war for thee.” Whitman here, as with the entirety of the poem, is addressing war’s cause, the catalyst, whether it’s woman, land or just spiny nature, which drives men to systematically, nationalistically kill. So of course, any war is great for its cause, bearing thereto a marked purposefulness.
“To Thee Old Cause” is indeed catapulted above convention by its lack of anger, and its laudatory mode. Although the subject is formless, invisible, intangible and unaesthetic, it within this piece garners the same sort of effusive exaltation on long lines as where otherwise the “sea” of “boundless blue” would do, as in the following: “Thou peerless, passionate, good cause… These chants for thee, the eternal march of thee.” The exclamation points still adorn the segments of especial magnanimity, just as in his lighter pieces, and his tone is still one of focused, almost suffocated surety — never ruminating or pontificating, but speaking directly.
In other words, it’s the same as the average Whitman production, if you will, except that instead of being addressed at something warm and fuzzy like a beautiful landscape or morally sound (from a distance) construction workers, it makes its spectacle what could be seen as the ultimate evil, the cause of war. How this plays out in light of the Paglia lines is interesting, because her opinion backfires — it’s Whitman’s very female passivity which affords his poem such weight and power, as if killing the imperious war machine with kindness. It’s as kinetic energy within temperance, only the more stalwart for being unique. And for this reason, it’s currently my favorite poem.

Where reason ends,

Worship begins.