Darrell Gray's poem begins with a joke about self-protection. The speaker looks out for himself "like a cushion / run over by a taxicab in a rain forest". It is a funny, nonsensical picture of a soft thing, a comfort object, flattened by a machine in a place where it doesn't belong. That image sets up the poem's central tension: a fragile private self living in a loud, mechanised, slightly menacing world. The title carries the same double meaning. "Looking out for myself" can mean guarding my own interests, but it can also mean gazing out of a window. The poem moves from the first sense to the second, and by the final stanza the speaker is looking hard at the world and finding it stranger than he is.
The middle stanzas build the speaker's inner life out of dream logic. An angel trips over a roller skate left "on the front porch of my childhood", and the sacred collides with the toy-box clutter of an ordinary kid. Nearby, "the metallic savor of bees" keeps "boring a hole in the crucifix". The phrase mixes taste, metal and sound, and it suggests something small and persistent wearing away religious certainty. Judging by the imagery, childhood here is a place where faith and menace sit side by side. The Sunday dinner "full of fish" could hint at a churchgoing household, though the poem never says so.
The speaker's way of getting through is retreat into imagination. He sleeps "in my alternate selves", turns on the radio and finds that what he hears is "realer on the inside than the outside". The idea that "the ground was racing to stay in one place" sums up the feeling well, since it is all motion and no progress. Then comes the poem's self-description: "a language of automatically changeable parts". This works as a description of the poem itself, in which images are swapped in and out, joined by sound and surprise rather than argument. Even the claim to empathy is undercut. He can project himself "into the owl's head and the head of the engineer", moving between wisdom and machinery, "tho I prefer to play pool and drink dark beer". The grand imaginative leap ends in a shrug, and that sudden drop from the cosmic to the casual is one of Gray's favourite moves.
Formally, the poem is eight unrhymed quatrains of long, loose, conversational lines. There is no capital letter anywhere, "i" stays lowercase, and punctuation barely appears until the sixth stanza, so the speech tumbles forward. Enjambment keeps pushing us over line breaks ("kept / boring a hole"). The one clear end rhyme, "engineer" with "beer", lands almost by accident, which suits the deflating joke. Where traditional rhyme would give order, Gray gives momentum and surprise.
The sixth stanza starts with "let it be said, then," a mock-official phrase, and plays on the old proverb that nothing comes of nothing: "nothing / ever came of nothing, something did". Trees become houses and leave "only a silence" and "miniature lakes", where deflated footballs lie as "still-born bodies" around "a pentagon of sleepless slime". A football's panels do include pentagons, so the shape fits, though the word may also nudge us toward something more institutional. The poem is vague about this, and its unease works through suggestion. The image of the alphabet that "ran out of beds / and had to be closed down pending further notice" turns language into an overbooked, exhausted hotel or hospital, a fitting picture of a poet who can no longer trust ordinary words.
The last stanza supplies the logic behind the whole poem: "if you think i am crazy just take a look at the world." The "actual bird" in the "hopeless blue" sky turns out, on a closer look, to be "a giant airplane full of nervous people". The speaker's trick has been reversed. His own poem makes birds out of strange parts, but the real world is the one that makes false birds. The final words, "nervous people", reveal the mood behind the jokes: anxiety, which the surreal imagery has been carrying all along.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it doesn't ask us to choose between wit and worry. It makes us laugh at the flattened cushion, then leaves us on a plane full of people who are as frightened as the speaker.