His universe cracks like an eggshell

and he pops out of the crust

like a stripper from a cake,

a phoenix from its pyre.

On fire with words, he’s the worst

and best battling on a darkling plain.

Then he’s Shanghaied away from shore

and what he as a human being can bear.

He escapes during a storm, makes land,

and crawls down a cave to Middle Earth.

He wrestles the Midgard Serpent,

Fenris the Wolf, finally Old Bones himself,

but sells his soul to slink back alive.

Next, he sneaks to the other side

of the tracks, drapes his elbow across a rail

in front of an onrushing freight, then stumbles on

waving the bloody stump like a flag,

still believing in everything and nothing,

having never lived inbetween anything;

having always stuffed the too-skinny present

with Way-out-there or Way-back-then.

Then he slips through the meager rupture of Now

into whatever rapture poets earn for their trouble.

— Andrew H. Oerke