The Ghost of Walt Whitman Sits Outside My Window Like an Owl

I am in very unwilling conversation with the ghost of Walt Whitman.

He irritates me as I try to sleep.

Walt Whitman, flakes in his beard,

perches on my bed and coyly asks what’s up.

Walt Whitman talks a lot about freedom.

I am not very free Mr Whitman when you crouch at the end of my bed like an owl, disconsolate demanding attention.

Walt Whitman is sometimes in silent communion with the sky, and I stick my neck out of the window where he is slumped on the windowsill and we both slack-jawed adore the weather

  Walt Whitman tells me the stars are exclamation marks and the moon a semi-colon 

to which I respond does that mean the moon is subject to the whims of fashion and he grins and says of course

and propels himself up away blazing infinite like a rocket car from a sci-fi B-movie and sails behind the moon

Walt Whitman sometimes appears late a little sheepish and a lot self-satisfied and I know he’s been carousing with the stars and pressing old hands to soft star-flesh and murmuring to hydrogen

We don’t talk about it but he never appears when I’m otherwise occupied Walt Whitman tells me the only guilt I need to feel is the guilt of not seeing and not feeling

I ask him whether I shouldn’t feel guilt over my lack of poetic productivity – his corpus, after all, as energetic as the flesh

He tells me poetry is an extension of the body and my lack of it is an injured limb, which I think is consolatory but he says is encouraging, since I ought to begin physiotherapy for the poetic muscle

Walt Whitman is frazzled, and I catch him once staring at a stale glass of water next to my bed

  He says he misses being thirsty

Walt Whitman never makes any sense and when I drift asleep my dreams are looping and recursive and I think he’s narrating them but when I wake up and demand to know what happens next the end of my bed is a block of blank air.

Walt Whitman do you know you drive my fantasies of America, America I only know refracted through you

  Walt Whitman you are very forgiving when I badly imitate your greater acolytes

     Walt Whitman I’ve never cared for sense or punctuation

Walt Whitman the only time you didn’t sympathise was when I came to you crying with the shock of finding out some people believe what they say

Sincerity is the soul you say

I’m scared I have no soul I say

you say Then fear’s the truth

telling the truth is easier said than done but Walt you don’t command or demand you are simply oblivious to the possibility of falsehood and I can’t betray you

Sometimes at family events I go for a breather in the bathroom and I hear a tap on the window and your gleaming mischievous face is haloed in the dark and you hand me a hip-flask and we fall drunk to the floor clinging to the basin-stand and giggle with our cheeks to the tiles

and after a while you drag me up and push me out the door to make noises at my second cousin while you get in the bath and keep drinking, red-faced and bubbling

Walt Whitman I don’t know if you were a prophet or a genius but I am very tired, and you crouch on the bed-post hunched like a cloud, and you watch my face and I watch yours and the traffic crashes in the silence like a wave inside a shell

This is derivative, I say to Walt.

Well, he replies, rolling over on my bed and spraying sandwich crumbs, We can’t all be visionaries.