i look out for myself like a cushion
run over by a taxicab in a rain forest
the sky forming the top half of a sandwich
of radiation and gooseflesh hung up on poles to dry

all this is because an angel tripped over
a roller skate i left on the front porch of my childhood
where always the metallic savor of bees kept
boring a hole in the crucifix

i slept in my alternate selves until i got hungry
i measured the span between hunger and sunday dinner
the distance was overwhelming and full of fish
i turned on the radio and got caught up in emotions

but the strange thing is whatever i heard
seemed realer on the inside than the outside
i imagined the ground was racing to stay in one place
i imagined a language of automatically changeable parts

so that now in the comfort of my writing chair
it is with relative ease that i project myself
into the owl's head and the head of the engineer
tho i prefer to play pool and drink dark beer

let it be said, then, that tho nothing
ever came of nothing, something did
as trees come from the forest to be made into homes
leaving only a silence there, and the miniature lakes

on whose bottoms the still-born bodies of footballs
rally around a pentagon of sleepless slime
and all because the alphabet ran out of beds
and had to be closed down pending further notice

if you think i am crazy just take a look at the world
in the hopeless blue of the sky flies an actual bird
but looking closely it's not a bird at all
it's a giant airplane full of nervous people