Looking Out for Myself — Summary

Darrell GrayCheerful

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

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Gray's speaker tries to make sense of himself and the world, and the poem keeps swerving into surreal images instead of giving a straight answer. A cushion runs over by a taxi in a rain forest, an angel trips on a roller skate, bees bore into a crucifix. These pictures feel like a half-remembered dream of childhood, religion, and hunger, all jumbled together. The speaker admits he'd rather play pool and drink dark beer than do the hard work of imagining other minds, though he can manage it from his writing chair.

The tone is playful, shrugging, and a little defensive. "Let it be said" and "if you think I am crazy" sound like someone daring us to doubt him. Then the ending lands with a quiet jolt: what looks like a bird is really an airplane full of nervous people. The mood shifts from whimsy to unease, suggesting the modern world looks natural from a distance but is anxious up close.

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