Entering the age of the unfamiliar
A dog stood on its hind legs and talked to him.
The flowers had the faces of old men. The paths
he took returned him to the places he’d just been to
the places he’d just been, and when he wrote
he found he’d written backwards or the pen
had eaten up the words already there and left him
silent. The great words that he felt had dwelt within him
came out as other words – mean spirited and small.
The friend he turned to turned into a bolster;
the others turned against him. His home
was not his own; his keys were in the fridge
and suddenly the kitchen had no door.
He knew they weren’t in Kansas anymore.
Middle-aged Male Anorexic 