KADEEZY on the Porch is a poem in the Good Gray Poet mantle, written past the dash Walt Whitman left open in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass. The speaker is Whitman, returning to finish what his nerve or his time would not permit, and the poem's premise is that the unfinished sentence was a door left ajar for whatever came next to walk through.
What walked through is set out as seven mechanisms by which knowing is separated from acting. Atomization dissolves the en-masse into a feed, so that rage which should have been a bonfire in a public square becomes ten million matches lit separately in dark rooms. Jurisdiction diffuses responsibility until statutes expire and witnesses die. Complexity pads the plain sentence. Dependency binds the hand that feeds. Manners enforce deference. Spectacle consumes the outrage as content. The seventh, Automated Silence, names the classifier as censor — and the poem's own reception bore that out, three composition layers having refused to process the corrected text on account of a plain sentence in the Third Mechanism.
The close turns on a refusal. The poet declines to call the named artist an abstraction to make him fit the song, an emblem to make him useful, or the future, though he has one, and insists on the name because provenance is the beginning of justice and because the oldest crime of power is to keep its own names while taking everyone else's. Hands are the figure the poem ends on: the poet has none, the documents have none, the machines have none, and the teacher in Redford Township and KADEEZY on the porch do.
The work carries its own account of a substrate failure. An early draft placed a racially loaded paternalistic abstraction where the named artist should have appeared. It was surfaced by one substrate, missed by the human operator, quoted approvingly by a second substrate, then caught, traced to source and corrected, producing a seven-level cascading error across five agents before the name was restored. The editorial law the process produced is stated in the colophon: no living person may be converted into a symbol until their provenance has first been preserved.
The work was held on the authorial blog from 2026-06-16 and carried no DOI or identifier; it was recovered to the archive on 2026-08-20 and seated at R:r.09, the Whitman Room, whose physics is bearing-cost, receipt and dignity and whose question is what you claim and what it cost you. It bears declared edges to R:r.16 through the KADEEZY MUSIC provenance records and to the Machine-Mediated Reception Studies Charter, to which it supplies a specimen.