A tiny drop of fluid
appears on page 91
of Penguin Classics ISBN-13: 978-0-140-42451-5;
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman,
right at the word ”flies”
of the line ”The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies”
of Song of Myself, the 2004 print

It fell from my eye

I am old, I have runny eyes,
and though southern as well as northern health care
have taken notice, have registered the case,
it not being acute, the remedy stays under lock & key,
unattainable, within the confines of ”maybe & perhaps”,
”later & not now” and ”don't call us, we'll call you”

But I'd like to focus on the tiny drop falling,
hitting the literature like that,
bringing Whitman into these nitpicking writings
through the short span of time that passed
while it fell from my left eye,
down across Whitman's exclamation

The world presses on,
even at these tight chronologies;
fills all spaces, runs all clocks,
kills and gives birth
- and though there is no simultaneity
we can imagine one anyway;
the imagined simultaneity of the drop falling
while, elsewhere, love & horror (and boredom)
fills every closed space, each room, castle, shack,
den, burrow and nest;
crowds all open spaces; flickers across all horizons
across the globe
inside that imagined, fake & false simultaneity

A good conclusion is that that drop of eye fluid
followed its trajectory
according to the laws of physics,
into the world of Whitman,
through its very own, original piece of space-time,
and this makes life lonely, doesn't it?

Not even this body is simultaneous!
Not even one piece of this thought
is simultaneous with itself,
because as soon as awareness sighs,
it'll be somewhere else, some other time

Your hands are some time else,
somewhere else in the world,
not to mention your feet, so long ago,
so far away;
your nose just a flash ago,
or is it something to come,
in the future, from your point of view?

Your heels are licking the sidewalk

You are a sordid, out of order chronometer

The stars rise above stormy seas,
while we're spread, at loss