Ya-Honk

 for Walt Whitman

I can’t smell your belches
so I take them mediated
on the page as I find them.

In their song, I hear the bluster
of someone with no secrets,
strict manners or form

like a Facebook profile gone mad
with existence. I hear the voice
of multitudes, civilization’s self-love

running loud and demanding,
saying, ‘Look and awe at me,
at my enough-ness streaming out

like a mill-trodding flood of
undiminished returns.’
You, at critical mass,

erect in book and in world,
scream intimacy unimaginable;
your cantos, a vision of a way to be.

I put you down and away walk
when, as in a relationship, it becomes
difficult to tell who is speaking.

Found poem from a discussion forum thread on “Song of Myself” in Coursera’s “Modern and Contemporary Poetry” class.