I’m playing poker with a couple of douc langurs visiting from the zoo. I’m looking for tells on their silly-solemn primate faces. The red-shanked one tells me that today is Everything You Think Is Wrong Day; the gray-shanked one, naturally, tells me that that today is not Everything You Think Is Wrong Day. I think that it is, so it must not be, and maybe I won’t be pursued by furies to the edge of this world, where there be dragons. I’ll just stay mired in double negatives; or, no, I think I’ll stay mired in double negatives, which means that I will not—maybe I’ll fly into existential freedom, and the Void will gift me a pair of pilot’s wings.

Sigmund’s cigar

But anyway, the doucs go to bed; I’m not tired yet, so I flip on Colbert, who jokes about the guy who heroically resigned over the war with Iran, only to turn out to be an anti-Semite. This is the worst time to be alive, I think. Then Colbert’s guest, Ed Norton, starts to quote Whitman—yes, holy shit, he’s spouting poetry on network TV! There’s never been a better time to be alive, I think. And Norton recites, “There was never any more inception than there is now ... nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

Albert’s dice

I think about the word “inception” and how I tend to live in my head, or bury myself in screens, while the world is dying and being born all around me. But it’s not just me—you’re here, Jen, watching Colbert with me, and you were with me when we met the douc langurs at the zoo and made that duo part of our lore and lingo, and you’re the music that can drown out all the noise of news. We turn off the screens and go to bed. Tomorrow, we’ll live.

pair o’ docs

Publisher’s Note:

American actor and filmmaker Edward Norton recites excerpts from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and “Song of Myself” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (18 March 2026):
https://www.facebook.com/colbertlateshow/videos/edward-norton-delivers-a-powerful-reading-of-walt-whitmans-crossing-brooklyn-fer/1686435822523263/

Quotation in O’Sullivan’s haibun above (“There was never any more inception than there is now ... nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”) is from “Song of Myself” (Section 3, Lines 3 and 6). That latter poem and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” are from the collection Leaves of Grass (published in multiple editions between 1855 and 1892) by American poet and essayist Walt Whitman (1819–1892), now widely considered “the father of free verse.”

For the text of these two poems and others, see also Poetry Foundation:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45470/crossing-brooklyn-ferry

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/149913/walt-whitman-at-200

Brian O’Sullivan

teaches English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He is a squad member of the podcast ThePoetrySpace_ and a poetry reader for Chestnut Review. His poems have appeared in Contemporary Haibun Online, Modern Haiku, ONE ART, Rattle, and Verse-Virtual among others; his fiction has appeared in Every Day Fiction, The Galway Review, and the anthology HOWL: New Irish Writing (2023 and 2024); and his work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Five Poems by Brian O’Sullivan (see especially “The Hunter of Ostara” and “An Irish Malediction”) in Lothlorian Poetry Journal (9 April 2026)

⚡ Fall: sestina and commentary by O’Sullivan (in response to a Rattlecast prompt), posted to Rattle online (30 October 2023)