Category: Responding To Walt Whitman

Ever met a Time Traveler?
I know a few
They tend to stick around
It’s not like the movies
No flux capacitors
No phone booths
They use other parts
Hopes and hand motions
Pigments and prose
Pens and poses
Impressions and pains
Damnations and prayers…
Portals
Flowing forward and back
Repeating
Repeating
Repeating
Repeating
Etc
They aren’t trying to travel
Just trying to see
Tripping in the darkness
Feeling the texture
Timeless and infinite
And falling in
Like my buddy Walt
Watching the Brooklyn Ferry
Falling forever
Into the distant future

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”)

Goodbye Mr. Whitman
Companions these three years
You dead and singing your leaves
Me dead and singing my own verse
The two of us banging on the pipes
Tapping out messages across a century
What an odd classroom
A dead teacher that cannot hear
And a sleeping student that cannot speak
You’ve led me down this path
With more to read and say and sing
I round the corner out of sight
Wave thanks and love to a master
Your deadman’s patience
Your poet’s eye
Turning I wonder, am I your fancy?

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Good-Bye My Fancy!“)

There’s a pain in my gut
Probably indigestion
Or maybe the first note of my finale

On stage a melancholy dead man
Eulogizes chaotic doodles
Spent life and ambiguous purchases

Our laughter echos his chorus
Nervous and fitful
Unplaced and a little angry

We worship in playhouse darkness
In this temple to the muse
The muse of muses: mortality

T. Weeks
(A response to “Unseen Buds”)

Thousands of years from now
When the robots have long since come for us
Redacted our existence
And spread their own civilization
Will they (or it) have a myth
A complex ontology all their own
When they catch a virus
Will they pray to the thought of us
Our images offering hollow promises of redemption
Maybe
Or maybe they won’t
Then what a salvation we will have given

T. Weeks
(A response to “Grand Is the Seen“
Also while reading Robopocalypse)

Writing a book is on my bucket list
But I just don’t have the time
Seems I’ve spent it elsewhere
Plots and premises stand in line
Blocked by perfection
Dulled by inaction

-T. Weeks
(A response to “The Unexpress’d”)

Robin Williams died sick and alone
Two hours of clips and interviews
Milled to precision to form an automaton
On loop to make kids laugh and buy pizza
Giggles and tears running on the hour every hour
The muse of disrupted expectation
Doomed to repeat himself forever

-T. Weeks
(A response to “L. of G.’s Purport“)

Two months away
Two days back
All seen and done
Rectangles in albums

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Mirages”)

Vigilant Grizzly King
Atop his glacial throne
Narrows his eyes
He watches his valleys
His ridges and hills
Berries freckling his trails
Elk stooping at his rivers
Marmots and chipmunks
Busking scraps from his hikers
Migratory RV’s stampede his roads
Leave food and stink on everything
This is his valley
All that is in it is his
All who enter are his
Nothing leaves unless he wills it
Bow before your king

-T. Weeks
(A response to
“The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete”)

Where is the common place
Have I ever been there
Or have I never left

-T. Weeks
(A response to “The Commonplace“)

It’s the first night back in the house
After the flood
We sift boxes and greet rooms
And reintroduced waiting breezes
Just before the credits roll on this episode
The washing machine begins to spin
Like a desperate villainous lunge at our backs
Water drips from a light
Tapping out a promise on the kitchen floor
Disaster is always waiting in our walls
Working it’s way towards a sequel
Or maybe a trilogy

-T. Weeks
(A response to “A Persian Lesson“)