jaywalking on greyhound bridge

lost on the supermarket floor next to piles of dirty potatoes:
someone else's shopping list, footprint stamped across
bread
milk
cheese
strings of senseless numbers without a dial tone.

in the margin biro-skinny blue birds spin from a stick figure's outstretched hands,
head a messy hole, fingers curled up, clawing - skyline torn;
one bird ripped in half.

what i've done is project myself into the vegetable aisle.

i am twelve cans of tuna sterilised milk instant noodles chilli flakes and a bag of precooked rice-
i am someone else's shopping list,
ad nauseam.  ad nauseam.

-

glancing at me like a nervous catfish,
the taxi driver is a radio station, fingering the dial
sweating.  cars plait a thirtyminute belt across the bridge and i
spend it sociopathic, groaning a psychosis, speaking to the driver
like he's a fucking psychiatrist; stuck inside with the condensation-

it fogs a miasma between us so thick i can hardly breathe.

pretending he's you i feign honesty: look,
mate, the person sitting next to you is a coward, a pathological
cunt, he's a single-celled organism pretending to be extra-dimensional hyperspace,
a coldsore-thin stray dog a liar
self-absorbed serial masturbator

and i'm still jacking off.  what i'm trying to say is i'm
not another universe pulled back into continents building-building-building pushing back into my eyelids the planet swelling behind them swarming and fraying into filaments and wheatfields and forests of mud and stone and grit and my palms are grazed and full of shit and my face is melted down into my chest and this is only the physical this is only my ego this is only a trembling it's my narcissism my self worth my idiocy it's my confusion and my apathy and the people in my head and it's my inability to admit that i'm not honest i'm not bedrock i'm not human i'm not god i'm not
sorry.  but that's not true either.  

stuck in the middle of traffic
the driver abandons his taxi.