"Always Shaking"

Always Shaking

Do I have to
show you again
how I clear my mind,
how I beg my blood
to thin,
how I introduce my back
to the ceiling
and become weightless?
Watch as I
fly through the air
toward the bookcase;
head first through the shelves,
squeezing through un-read books
orange and full
like pumpkins
and right through
thin air.

I pop out
on the other side
where it’s the end
of the world again and again,
where the ground
is epileptic
and all the buildings
do the rhumba,
almost toppling like a mountain of wooden barrels
in a Mack Sennet film
yet held together by the
tension of,
by the giant, invisible
rubber band of
time.

©JEF 1989