David J Bauman

There’s something wrong with my Whitman book–it’s too clean. I bought it new because I couldn’t find it used, and the pages are so white and clinical. Leaves of Grass should be on paper growing dark with age, folded and wrinkled through frequent use. It’s hard to read crisp, pristine pages proclaiming the secret of the twenty-ninth bather. The book belongs in the woods, not on a shelf.

A bit of genius that just made me so happy to read tonight. It’s good to know I am not alone in such thoughts, but I could never have thought to put it into these words of Ricky’s I’m downright jealous in fact. I wish I had written this. It’s a poem in prose.

Thank you, Ricky, it’s good to meet a man as addicted to books as I am to poetry itself. I cannot think of these as bad obsessions.