I’ve known it to be so heavy
when all along it was as weightless as my fingerprint.
All the things that happened
were the makings of a unique grid that wraps around me.
The lack of control.
The bruised fruit.
The half-read novels.
The obedient stairway.
The hand I took so long to hold.
They are slashed words in an edited poem.
It’s my poem to read…
but I’ll turn it into a song if I damn well please to.
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Oh my gooooodddnessss!! ok so this is absolutely the longest poem. it’s like 30 pages long in this book. i thought millay was it but nope…. this one by Walt Whitman is it. i’m only taking my favorite lines so far and i’m taking my sweet time. He had me at “atom” I am in love with this.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
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Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
3
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
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I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
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Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and
am not contain’d between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and
fathomless as myself,
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)
Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
For me those that have been boys and that love women,
For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the
mothers of mothers,
For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
For me children and the begetters of children.
Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.
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________________________________________________ more to come of my faves…
It’s simple. In order to discover, one must move.
We move on our own volition, or we move automatic with a catalyst.
What makes me move?
Besides the fact that I am driven?
Besides the fact that I desire a foreign comfort?
Besides all the beauty and wonderlust of the world?
A precise feeling makes me move.
Like a reflecting ray of light that hits exactly where it’s meant to hit,
I know how I want to venture… how I want to discover, how I want to move.
(If a thought is no different from matter, then in my mind you are truth. You are as real as the earth to my touch.)
I would have to swim waters to experience the air that’s so close to you…
because that which you evaporate,
I will allow it to filter through me. I will understand you.
I would have to walk deserts to identify those mirages in you…
because what you feel to be real,
I will see it for you. I will know you.
It is the innate urge.
There’s so much more earth to be felt now…
than there ever was then.
