SurVision Magazine

Walk Out of Yourselves!


Jerry half-shouts, Walk out of yourselves!
At the end of each session.
Big bald Fester-head, arms extended, wriggling white fingers –
Ooga-booga!
Walk out of yourself!
As if everyone didn't, every day,
Pulling on their Dockers and new Spanks,
Mostrando un poco de teta al nuevo propietario.
As if we hadn't walked out of ourselves
Just to get here – stepping over dead babies,
Crack dads, young girls with one leg in Fallujah,
Just to get here – a crumbling basement
Supply Room cleaned out in the old Y
Set every Monday with yes folding chairs and a table
Of stale cookies and weak coffee.
Wanting what everyone wants, Jerry –
To walk back into themselves,
Lock the door,
Lie back on the couch in their own house in the dark
For a few minutes, alone in one body.






Daniel Lawless's book, The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With and Other Poems is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in February 2018. Recent poems appear, or are forthcoming, in The American Journal of Poetry, Asheville Review, Cortland Review, B O D Y, The Common, FIELD, frACtalia (Romania), Fulcrum, The Louisville Review, Manhattan Review, Numero Cinq, Pif, Adirondack Review, The Meadow, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Solstice, and other journals. He is the founder and editor of Plume Magazine.