Retirement has proven to be a struggle, but at least it hasn’t been a stubbly, weak-shit aftermath.  That is why I wrote this poem in solidarity with all of humanity, quick or gone.  I am not suggesting that we, passive and silent, carry on with our weight. Yes, do keep on. Wail like the tornado siren that is our life, wail in warning to all the others, “It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming!” That is what Whitman meant by the barbaric yawp in “The Song of Myself”, the untranslateable gibbering of anyone un-“Greek”.  It is also what he meant when he wrote the last line of that poem, “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, missing me one place, search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.”  Makes me feel grand to imagine Walt Whitman seated under a chestnut tree, humming away, and waiting for me down the road. Of course, these leaves of grass await us all, forever and always on pages and in memory.

I hesitate to put this song of myself on the same page as Whitman’s ultimate verse, but here it is, published on this blue Monday in July.  Let us henceforth call Monday, “Melee Day”. Here is my barbaric yawp, unkempt and uncomfortable and perhaps irredeemable and untamed. May we pack up and howl at “the vapor and the dusk”.

Here is a text version that you can howl with.

You Get What You Get

I get to feel pain,
I get to be pitied,
I get to know betrayal,
I get to show weakness,
I get to be a sinner with a dark soul,
I get to be curbstomped by my allies
and disappointed with my enemies.
I get to live to feel the pain of another day.
I don’t have to die yet,
not now, not yet, not just yet.
Thus,
our lives prove to be opponents
worthy of the suffering
and wholly up to the task
of squaring their shoulders
and hammering back, over and over,
with what remains of our tattered days
until we can’t keep on.
While not quite grateful, I do appreciate
the opportunity
to carry on.