Whitman's Sleeves

Like Walt Whitman's sleeves

draped over the quarterdeck

Like leaves of sass, we begin anew

Forged in 21st Century tears, an international joint venture

Chinese, American, but neither

Forgetting Eztra Pound but preserving his protease stripping of

The Waste Land to riddles

Preserving Eliot but damping the strings of the world guitar

Strumming cosmichords we penetrate the elite with poetic gifts that

Outstrip politics, transcending mutilated knowledge

Where matter rises like a Colossus to shake itself off

A dog-eared fable of empire no longer applies

The lies they told us about ourselves must die in paroxysms of glitter

Where the old man and the seizure's salad days are over, yet they begin a nude dessert

For the beauty of woman and man balks account

But the animals aren't bad either

And going beyond the well-thumbed Taroc pack Sylvia Plath

With Daddy kicked to a storm system of glitter dust

His big shoes to fill with dialectic healing bullets

His corkscrewed scenes inside the data mine drilling even deeper down

To the redemptive core that rises through kundalini ships crashed on the shores of time

To starboard, and matching hells in a wet loop

Ahab gives the orders to hunt for a new fish...