Like someone “off,”
I walked as slow as I could
for over a mile. I cried
somewhere in the middle,
and again at the end. And again,
after I had gotten as slow as I could,
squatting by a pond, because
I watched a deer shit himself there.
And again, in the hut with the life-jackets,
where I asked myself, “You’re supposed to
look like a stick, is that it?” accusingly.
Thinking, then, of watching myself
coming to the pond to sip water and take a dump (how ridiculous),
as one ‘off’ I preferred to stay back by a tree, suck leaves
for rain water, and i neither died from thirst, nor being eaten.
- BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
- « One-off 4
- » “How to Read John Ashbery”
