![\"pizza\"](\"https:\/\/guysreadingpoems.com\/grp_wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/pizza.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWalt Whitman accidentally broke his leg while skateboarding on a gnarly half pipe in Santa Cruz, California in the summer of 1988.<\/p>\n
Walt Whitman is the best damn slice of pizza Yankton, South Dakota has to offer.<\/p>\n
Walt Whitman is a huge totally unexplored sea cave at the bottom of the sea that no one even knows about yet.<\/p>\n
Walt Whitman likes long walks on the beach, professional wrestling, astrology, circuses, The National Geographic Society, any movie with Barbara Streisand in it, the occult, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, peace, love, understanding, joy, sadness, evil, sex, mustard, lava, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and pretty much everything else that has ever existed or ever will.<\/p>\n
Thank you.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n SELECTED POEMS BY WALT WHITMAN<\/p>\n From The Project Gutenberg EBook of Leaves of Grass<\/a>, by Walt Whitman<\/p>\n I have to say that my wonderful old UMass housemate Jeff Downey from Scottsbluff, Nebraska introduced me to most of my favorite Walt Whitman poems. Whenever he found something that really wowed him, he used to come out of his room and read it out loud to someone in his excellent wide open prairie voice. Thank you, Jeff!<\/p>\n Here are two of the best ones:<\/p>\n Section 20 from “Song of Myself”<\/p>\n Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?<\/p>\n All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own, I do not snivel that snivel the world over, Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?<\/p>\n Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, I know I am solid and sound, I know I am deathless, I know I am august, I exist as I am, that is enough, One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite, *<\/p>\n To a Stranger (from the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass<\/em>)<\/p>\n Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you, *<\/p>\n And here’s a part of “Song of Myself” that James Tate (1943-2015) used to read out loud to us in class. I can still hear his voice every time I read this poem.<\/p>\n (Section Six from “Song of Myself”)<\/p>\n A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.<\/p>\n Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.<\/p>\n Tenderly will I use you curling grass, This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, What do you think has become of the young and old men? They are alive and well somewhere, All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, —<\/p>\n Kyle Flak<\/a> is the author of I AM SORRY FOR EVERYTHING IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE UNIVERSE<\/a> (Gold Wake Press, 2017), WHAT HANK SAID ON THE BUS (Publishing Genius, 2013) (Winner of the Chris Toll Prize), THE SECRET ADMIRER (Adastra Press, 2010), and HARMONICA DAYS (New Sins Press, 2009). In 2013, he was a finalist for a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation. In 2015, he was chosen as a “Poet to Notice” by Grandma Moses Press. His writing has recently appeared in Frogpond, Hart House Review, Makeout Creek, Mudfish, Poetry East, Spinning Jenny, Whiskey Island, and various other magazine \/ anthology type of things. He went to school at Northern Michigan University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.<\/p>\n https:\/\/goldwake.com\/2016\/12\/13\/i-am-sorry-for-everything-in-the-whole-entire-universe\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nHow is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?<\/p>\n
\nElse it were time lost listening to me.<\/p>\n
\nThat months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.<\/p>\n
\ngoes to the fourth-remov’d,
\nI wear my hat as I please indoors or out.<\/p>\n
\ndoctors and calculated close,
\nI find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.<\/p>\n
\nAnd the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.<\/p>\n
\nTo me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
\nAll are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.<\/p>\n
\nI know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,
\nI know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt
\nstick at night.<\/p>\n
\nI do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
\nI see that the elementary laws never apologize,
\n(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by,
\nafter all.)<\/p>\n
\nIf no other in the world be aware I sit content,
\nAnd if each and all be aware I sit content.<\/p>\n
\nAnd whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten
\nmillion years,
\nI can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.<\/p>\n
\nI laugh at what you call dissolution,
\nAnd I know the amplitude of time.<\/p>\n
\nYou must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)
\nI have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
\nAll is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate,
\nchaste, matured,
\nYou grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
\nI ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours
\nonly nor left my body mine only,
\nYou give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you
\ntake of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
\nI am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or
\nwake at night alone,
\nI am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
\nI am to see to it that I do not lose you.<\/p>\n
\nHow could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.<\/p>\n
\ngreen stuff woven.<\/p>\n
\nA scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
\nBearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see
\nand remark, and say Whose?<\/p>\n
\nAnd it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
\nGrowing among black folks as among white,
\nKanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
\nreceive them the same.<\/p>\n
\nIt may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
\nIt may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
\nIt may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out
\nof their mothers’ laps,
\nAnd here you are the mothers’ laps.<\/p>\n
\nDarker than the colorless beards of old men,
\nDark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.<\/p>\n
\nAnd I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.<\/p>\n
\nAnd the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
\nsoon out of their laps.<\/p>\n
\nAnd what do you think has become of the women and children?<\/p>\n
\nThe smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
\nAnd if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
\nend to arrest it,
\nAnd ceas’d the moment life appear’d.<\/p>\n
\nAnd to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.<\/p>\n