It was an ostrich who asked me
to give stick my head in the ground.
He looked like what you think
an ostrich would look like, with his head in the dirt,
and the bright, pastel lights,
that come with things
from your imagination.
I colored him with crayon.
I could make rainbows with crayons back then.

I wish someone told me
what it meant, to get lost
in the dirt. I became a stray dog
digging all those holes.

I lived in a junkyard. The one on the side
of the highway next to the billboard
the Christians put up to help stop divorce that said
"Honey, Come home. The kids and I love you."
I slept in the back seat of a car with fleas
and ticks, stealing my food from a truck stop diner
until the day someone took the car away.
I had nowhere to go so I stopped
licking myself and left the junkyard to become the man
I am today. I got myself a job and started sitting
in the front seat. I even have a bed now with nothing

between me and the mattress but a sheet.
I have a taste for gin and girls who are buried
in borrowed wedding dresses.
I still lick myself sometimes because
old habits aren't easy things
to quit, like asking for extra
fortune cookies, hoping I will get something
good this time.


I shouldn't have been a man. I should have
been a bird, like the one who told me to
write stories in the dirt and whisper tales to the gnarled roots
of unnamed wild flowers. And never illustrate, he told me,

especially with crayon. You could get lost searching
for fortune at the tip of a crayon.