To A Crackpot

I still have a lot of text files from when I was in college and even high school, sequentially copied from floppy to floppy to hard drive to hard drive over the decades. I used to write poems and they were not good and neither is this one, but to my surprise it had some lines in it that I remembered but did not remember that I wrote myself. What was I doing with the line breaks though? I am pretty sure this would have been written in my junior year of college, maybe spring of 1992. Around this same time I submitted a short story to a magazine and the editor wrote back to me saying “free-floating anxiety cannot be what drives a narrative,” but I disagreed, obviously.

To a Crackpot

He eschews the shoulders
of giants. He chooses instead
the company of thin men, coffee-stained,
stooped with knowledge. They huddle
on the sidewalk, nodding, like crows
or rabbis. He speaks:
the world is hollow and we live
on the inside. (Murmurs of assent.) There
is a hole at the top where the water runs in. The sun
is smaller than my hand, and the stars
are smaller than the sun.

A woman walks by, drawing
his eye. She has no idea. Beneath their feet,
out in the dark, secret engines. The Earth turns like milk.