I No Longer Fit In This World

I no longer fit in this world,
(well, and that’s assuming, of course, that I ever did),
My edges are not square pegs in round holes,
Rather, I am too well-rounded to fit neatly in the squares
that they ask me to fill.
What are liberal ideals
When the wheels have fallen off the bus and been replaced by squares, going
clankety-clop, and jarring we riders with every turn
of a side?
My father-in-law used to tell me to be squarer in my thinking,
To stay inside the box rather than blob around on the outside,
But I thought he was old-fashioned, a dinosaur, with his meals
prepared on his wife’s back, her endless toil between stove and broom,
water-spent hands, grated with years of carrots, ceaseless on his behalf,
I didn’t know then that my blob would out because the box would shrink
And cut me on its edges of razor-wire and anger.
Where to fit, when the wings have shrunk in close to the body,
And each is filled with intolerant rage that rolls in like foam from a sprayed bottle of those
Silly strings, expanding until we’re flying without a center.
I cannot condone the way the masses are rallied,
With cries that echo the aristos of bygone years –
Forget what is in them, pass them, hate them,
They who do not follow our lead, they are the ones that must be undone.
Is death, a colleague asks, really too harsh a punishment
For those who do not believe correctly?
(I rather thought I was listening to an evangelical minister threaten me with eternity
In the pit, with the spiders)...
Digression, at this point in my life, the nasty, over-the-belt fat of middle-age
Time of life,
Where I run, and in the running come undone like the square wheels on the bus that goes nowhere,
Jolting as our progress attempts itself,
Though I just want it to take me far, far away?
Once, and it seems like just yesterday, I believed
In tomorrow.  How did I do that?  Where were the bitter herbs and smell of fire-drenched reeds to tell me that
Life had meaning, Darwinian or lead by God, who cared, if in the offing I could do and be and see
Something beyond my narrow horizon?
Now my eyes are pitted with pebbles and marks and dust that
Blinds them, crazes them, glazes them,
And beyond my front door there is howling that makes me want nothing but the comfort
Of my couch, the warm snog of dog breath on my neck, and the smell of human burrowing.
I seem to have outlived my time here,
And without so much as a fare-thee-well, life has passed me by.
I no longer fit here, not here or anywhere,
Not even on my couch.
The dog, in stretching, has pushed me off.