Day 18

Urine and Lilies

for Pablo Neruda

I had an early love for Walt Whitman.
I did.
He was not by any means a concrete idol,
jutting out over the deserted lines.
he seemed, to me, to simply be
a Man of Truth.
And I've wanted to tell the truth,
since the age of seven.
Flipping through a tattered copy
of Ecran at the age of sixteen
I found my namesake.
I wanted to fall into the creases,
and disappear into the little folded pages,
smelling of urine and lilies.
Whitman sang of America
and I sang of Despair,
which is everywhere else.
Once I learned the supernatural
impressions of word pairings,
I wrote a love poem for every
year I was alive.
I don't think anyone appreciated that.
The love I felt was too naively erotic.
And though I am no, Walt Whitman,
I am the voice of the exotic,
of the psychotic, neurotic.
The Quixotic.
See, I can make rhymes too.