John Green Reads Poetry

Ok. Hank, because I’m going to Orlando to work on Paper Towns I’m traveling pretty light.

I’ve got nothing but a change of clothes, the computer, and my old friend Walt Whitman.

Alright, Hank, we’re gonna close it out with some poetry. [reads poem]

Actually I really need everybody to keep feeding on the specters in books or else I’m out of a job.

All goes onward and outward and nothing collapses; I’ll see you tomorrow.

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.