Who will show first today,<\/p>\n
besides me of course?<\/p>\n
Who will implode?<\/p>\n
Who will wither with grace<\/p>\n
or squirm?<\/p>\n
Who has disappeared?<\/p>\n
Who suffered a tracheotomy<\/p>\n
to breathe foul justice?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The sweatband man skates up!<\/p>\n
Cigarette dangling,<\/p>\n
black slacks,<\/p>\n
black knee pads,<\/p>\n
black loafers,<\/p>\n
black satin jacket,<\/p>\n
gray hair pulled in a ponytail.<\/p>\n
The ponytail blows<\/p>\n
like a flag,<\/p>\n
gray against the gray sky.<\/p>\n
Dude has style,<\/p>\n
a style keeping him alive.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I’ve decided to sit by the Coke Machine.<\/p>\n
It feels full of life. I say hello.<\/p>\n
No Walt Whitman in here anymore.<\/p>\n
I bulked up on him.<\/p>\n
I read a historian who wrote<\/p>\n
that Walt supported<\/p>\n
the invasion of Mexico in 1848.<\/p>\n
He probably did,<\/p>\n
the Manifest Destiny and all.<\/p>\n
He was ahead of his time,<\/p>\n
but not then.<\/p>\n
It was soon to come<\/p>\n
in Leaves of Grass<\/i><\/p>\n
when he invaded<\/p>\n
American poetry<\/p>\n
and took a scythe<\/p>\n
to the tall rigid meters,<\/p>\n
and cut loose liberation.<\/p>\n
Can a poet still do that?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Rigs roll up in the parking lot,<\/p>\n
another skateboard, too.<\/p>\n
A dog is vaping.<\/p>\n
A woman is crying.<\/p>\n
A gull drops a shit on the heather.<\/p>\n
It will be on soon,<\/p>\n
and I won’t believe<\/p>\n
what I see and hear,<\/p>\n
until I do.<\/p>\n\n
Who will show first today, besides me of course? Who will implode? Who will wither with grace or squirm? Who has disappeared? Who suffered a tracheotomy to breathe foul justice? The sweatband man skates up! Cigarette dangling, black slacks, black knee pads, black loafers, black satin jacket, gray hair pulled in a ponytail. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3957,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,42],"tags":[13,190,421,364,470,256],"class_list":["post-3956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-poetry","tag-oregon-coast","tag-oregon-poetry","tag-poem","tag-probation-poem","tag-probation-poetry","tag-walt-whitman","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3956"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3958,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3956\/revisions\/3958"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}