Sailing Alone Around the Room

by Billy Collins

It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.

words are food thrown down on the ground for other words to eat.

how can the evening bump into the stars?

we woke up to a revolution of snow, its white flag waving over everything, the landscape vanished,

drove home alone with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart

daydreaming— “juggling balls of cotton,” as they like to say in France.

I will be the strange one, the pale eccentric who wears the same clothes every day,