Category: Responding To Walt Whitman

The pen is intrepid
Ready always to dispense
Wherever it may

I am the coward
Sabotaging my balloon
Lest I journey

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning”)

Once I stumbled towards the get

Then roamed about the what for

Claiming both I smile and forget

-T. Weeks

(A response to “You Tides with Ceaseless Swell”)

Cosmic bowling starts at 3:30

No one told us

Half way through our game

The lights went out

The music came up

And we started to glow

An experience unanticipated

Bowling is still bowling

But these new colors feel wild

-T. Weeks

(A response to “Had I The Choice”)

The tide of summer rolls back

Exposing the first signs of fall

Kids cram into hand-me-down shin guards

While their parents wait on the sidelines

Some sit and some stand

Some stare at their phones and worry about politics

Others chat about the weather and the start of school

This has all happened before

In the Spring when the tide begins to roll back in

The cycle will begin again

Some of us need the waters to thrive

Some of us need freshly expose sand

Here at the shore we meet our children

-T. Weeks

(A response to “The Pilot in the Mist”)

From up on stage the band catches their breath

Respirating the halycon adoration of an aging crowd

From their elevated pulpit they see all our faces

The same faces they see in every city

The faces that bought these tickets to recapture the past

Thrusting cameras at the band hoping to cage this one

A cyborg Chex-Mix of big eyes and tiny lenses

The Buddha-smile below the trucker hat behind the mic

Contemplates his foolish fans

If he resents them he doesn’t show it

Instead he calls for silence

Holding the attention and the breath of the world

He offers his prayer for the world

You already own this moment stop trying to own this moment

-T. Weeks

(A response to “Halcyon Days”)

In a shadeless corner of a roadside swap meet
I met the Ghost of the Sierras
Hat drawn low on his homeless eyes
Behind a table of cherubic pipes and rusty blades
Artifacts of a time when his kingdom sprawled
He watches for the spot where my eyes hover
I settle on an ancient device and he opens the catacombs
His voice the heavy grind of rusted hinges
He tells me of its past and when last he used it
The journey of this thing is the journey of the ghost
I'm holding a child of the ghost in my hands
He turns to the sun and adjusts his hat
He tells me he's Arapaho so the sun doesn't bother him
Then I see that he is not the fallen king of this land
He is the land
The western comrade of Kerouac’s ghost of the Mississippi
Maybe even Kerouac himself
My arrogance has blinded me
Unworthy I replace the relic with newfound deference
Thank you I say
I'll do that he says

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Halcyon Days”)

In this forest there are no dead trees
Trunks lean inward against the massive weight of the sky
As the marshaled legs of an ancient army of green mammoths
Woolly green pelt sprouting from every side
The moss grows without respect for death or life
Long after spring branches with new needles disappear
Green pillars stand as scaffolding of the forest shrine

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Out of May's Shows Selected”)

Pitched about me in the dark a quiet tent and a dark forest
Soulful melodies rising from the valley with the stars
Staring down through the elbows of dead branches
At little faces that stare back unsure of a new experience
They don't really know why they are lying on uneven ground
Far from home
Up on the side of a vibrating hill with the chants of crowds below
Tonight is born a memory fresh from wherever they come
It will live and die with our family
And live again each time we gather and recite the incantations
That raise the ghosts of childhood and simpler times

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Abraham Lincoln, Born Feb. 12, 1809”)

Here we sit at the pickathon or some sort of thon
Wheezing heat of the day melting into the dark of the moon
The band tuning tweaking preparing
Cooling crowds bounce from blanket to blanket
As if on rafts in the calm of the river just before the falls
Bass and drums signaling change ahead

-T. Weeks
(A response to “After the Dazzle of Day”)

I love everyone
Or at least the nice ones
The rest should learn
Otherwise what's the point

Paul Simon knew it
Him and Al
Long before I was born
But was it really that different to be born 20 years earlier?
20 years?

None of us mean anything
And all of us mean everything
Maybe that's the secret to happiness
Or peace
Or whatever you call it

-T. Weeks
(A response to “To-Day and Thee”)