SHITHOUSE MANIFESTO

By Ron Whitehead / Issue 8

poets come out of your toilets

you’ve been holed up too long

playing with yourselves with

your wastes you’re wasting away

all olfactory sensations dead

what with your head now situated

on your posterior one eyed cyclopian

peering down into midnight bottom

of the outhouse and it’s time to

throw away the corncobs and Sears

catalogs and walk back out into

the barnyards the open pastures

of the world where animals and

people and flowers still bloom

where the sun still shines through

the moon at midnight in that other

world you’ve lost until now it’s

high time to wake up pull your sad

face and every other hanging down

part of you out of that stinking

forlorn lost world you’ll be fertilizer

soon enough for now it’s time to

reconstruct who you are your life

time to check out of the amnesia

motel and get back on the highway

61 or 66 or 69 and finally say

goodbye to those lonesome lost

blue pieces of who you used to

be and say hello to this yellow

sunrise post-world where the crows

are grinning and the morning glories

sing

Ron Whitehead is poet, writer, editor, publisher, organizer, scholar, professor. He grew up on a farm in Kentucky. He attended The University of Louisville and Oxford University. As poet and writer he is the recipient of numerous state, national, and international awards/prizes including The All Kentucky Poetry Prize, The Joshua B. Everett Oxford Scholar Award, English Speaking Union Oxford Scholarship (to study at Oxford’s International Graduate School with Dr. Valentine Cunningham, Head of English Literature at Oxford), The Yeats Club of Oxford’s Prize for Poetry. In 2006 Dr. John Rocco (NYC) nominated Ron for The Nobel Prize in Literature.