Happy Birthday to Me, Walt, and Jeremy

Tomorrow I will be 24 years old. Never being one who is comfortable as the focus of attention, I thought it would be a good time to point out two very special people who will also celebrate a birthday tomorrow.

The first is Walt Whitman. Walt is the father of the American voice (as I hear it). His writing celebrates life, death and everything in between. He’s the kind of writer who writes things that make you feel a little less alone in this world once you’ve read them. I choose to view our shared birth date as a cosmic sign that our souls are interconnected.

The second is Jeremy Kloehn. Jeremy and I were born on the same day, in the same year, and quite possibly in the same hospital. Jeremy and I both attended Woodview Elementry School in Grafton, Wisconsin. He is perhaps best known for being sent to the emergency room not once but on two separate occasions for stapling his own finger. I choose to view our shared birth date as a cosmic sign that the cosmos has a sense of humor.

Complaint of the Skeleton to Time

Take my love, it is not true,
So let it tempt no body new;
Take my lady, she will sigh
For my bed where’er I lie;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

Take my raiment, now grown cold,
To give to some poor poet old;
Take the skin that hoods this truth
If his age would wear my youth;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

Take the thoughts that like the wind
Blow my body out of mind;
Take this heart to go with that
And pass it on from rat to rat;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

Take the art which I bemoan
In a poem’s crazy tone;
Grind me down, though I may groan,
To the starkest stick and stone;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

.................... Allen Ginsberg