It has been a while ago now since an evening I called a *Walt Whitman Open Mic* took place in the West Village of NYC. I was pretty excited to read and to spend time with friends. We drank champagne whilst I intermittently took to the mic reading my poems for the first bit and then opening it up for anyone else who had something to say or read. Next to an area designated as the stage, sat a somewhat tattered copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the idea was if nothing else, a person could pick it up and read from the pages of this great American poem. That night was magic, a little drunken and overflowing with people liberating their voices in varied styles. It had no church and no pretense to shared belief in a dogma or moralizing, yet everything that happened had an air of spirit.
I understand the large hearts of heroes,
The courage of present times and all times;
The perfect night ended and the moment was over. Gone into memory were the twinkling lights and the candles in their holders. Gone was my former lover with his longtime girlfriend making me laugh. Gone were the flowers and each of their petals. The book and the poem, persisted. I took it with me to a short-term job hawking goods at a Holiday Market. I took it on the train between my native and adopted homes of the local tri-state area. I thought of Whitman on misty mornings, traveling some of the same terrain he saw from birth in Long Island to death in New Jersey. I took it with me to Colorado and then to Austin, Texas, where I joined the local poets and shared with them old Walt snippets; flipping from page to page, reading in the spirit of remix. I saw many hearts and eyes light up and this lit my own.
Peace is always beautiful
In a fast and re-shaping time there is much to learn from a poem that scandalized America, since I don’t see scandal at all, but many still would, at least based on its spiritual-sexual content or based on the author’s homosexuality. What I see is a proclamation of life’s reality; of love and freedom and love of freedom. In those lines I still feel myself as much as I ever did in pondering Jesus in my uniform or reading some heavy Buddhist tome. In Leaves of Grass is the impermanence and compassion embraced and applied. It’s a walking song and it’s the song I sang to myself when I thought all personal hope was lost or when I feared my country was going to fall into some type of thought-police state.
I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul…
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
True to poetry’s nature it’s time to let go of this particular copy. I’m stringing each page into a series of prayer flags. Most I’ll hang in memory of those I’ve lost during these last ten years since 9-11, for those I knew before, those I knew after and those I never knew and maybe never would had all other factors remained equal. Every so often we have to let things go so they don’t become just like the thing we let go of before. So, as I sit patiently sewing together each page of the poem I stop and stare at the lines, saying a kind of goodbye, not to the spirit but to the object. With each piercing of the page I let go a little bit of something that shaped me. With each knot I live the prayer of poetry, to the mystery of living and to the embracing of fears.
Answers come and go, and so do questions. Leaves come and go, and so do nations. This is what Old Walt taught me, to say amen, to drink a little something and have a little food, to make love and to hear each moment, person and breath as music. You are the wind and you are the wing that sails it. You are the body electric, and the body geo-thermal. Nothing lasts and the only things you truly honor are those things you can let go. I love it when prayer turns into paradox, that’s usually when I know I’m onto something. Now I must get back to sewing.
