Malkovich

Do you ever have a sense of looking out
Into the world through – from behind – your eyes?

I have interposed myself between the world and I.

At first, it’s looking through a window with the light behind you,
Your ghost a servant, eager to please, hovering in every eyeline.
Then, the horror: I discover
It won’t be dismissed.
And beyond my facsimile I see myself
Out there as well – in books, on TV,
Or in the street, in problems that have nothing to do with me,
In spaces and hiatuses, even the rain that smears my window sill,
And in tiny buttery daffodils.
So now I don’t get out of bed – fuck the world, and fuck myself –
Instead I search volumes for a poem that is not necessarily about itself.


22/01/04