Winging life on eagle’s wings and other poems

Nate Hoil

MULTIPLE VOICES COMING OUT OF THE SAME MOUTH.

There’s an invisible dog walking on the ceiling,

or there’s a dog in the apartment above.

Some dogs have no purpose other than haunting your house.

I say goodbye to one dog and turn to another.

Speak honest to me, dog.

Or say something cool that’s a lie.

Sometimes I imagine other people doing things that I’ve done,

then imagine whether or not I would forgive them.

I have fake eyes and fake arms and I have no head

and my neck is shaped like a funnel with eyes on it.

You understand how good this life is when you see how bad it can be.

I relearn everything every morning I wake up.

I know math equations that experts haven’t discovered yet.

I hope to continue to grow as a person.

As in grow taller.

As in continue to grow long into my adulthood.

Once I’ve written a song, I give it a name.

Everything is good luck.

Good luck with that.

Winging life on eagle’s wings.

I build a time machine,

go back,

and record my whole life on camera.

I’m disguised among the garden gnomes,

and peering between the tomatoes.

I have too much pride to live life without consequence.

I’ve been seen in public more times than I can remember.

Everyone is a part of something

smaller than themselves.

Sometimes time moves so slow that it looks like a photograph.

I hate that there are people who can picture my face.

The buildings look like bottles in a gas station refrigerator.

The people look different from year to year.

As for me, I’m on drugs and I’m writing a children’s book.

I have a dream about nothing,

and I wish the dream were real.

Party music continues.

Sometimes it is nice to relax with a beer

every day for 8-10 hours.

I give myself plenty of time to lie motionless on the ground.

I lay in the yard and make sound effects into my dead phone.

Don’t tell me I’m fine

unless you mean that I’m hot.

Things break easily, which makes them more expensive.

My apartment is filled with dated spy equipment.

The walls are made entirely out of doors.

I open a door and walk in on a salesman unzipping their own mouth.

We’ve all been there,

with nowhere sturdy to stand.

I’m thankful for everything anyone has ever done for me

or done to me.

Every mistake I’ve ever made is someone else’s fault.

I wake up in the morning and it’s someone else’s fault.

I can’t look away from a single car crash

because I’m always in the car.

Do the math and die.

If the floor is all lava, the chair that you stand on won’t last long.

I’m standing in lava wearing platform shoes as tall as a two-story house.

Lava doesn’t bother me because my heart is like an ice cream truck

racing past a crowd of screaming children.

No one understands me because I speak in a dead language.

I plan on burning a library down.

You never know how strong you are until you are pushed to your limit.

I’m not saying you’re particularly strong.

You just have a limit to your strength.

I have never been flattened by an object

that I couldn’t lift off of my body.

I’ve been thinking of getting flattened by magnified versions

of the body parts I see on the street.

I don’t know what bothers me more: people bothering me

or people choosing to bother other people.

I never understood cannibalism

before I met you.

After a double date

with Antonio Banderas
and two of his biggest fans.

I smile and spell your name wrong on a seemingly endless love letter.

I would like to get foolish with you

in a limousine full of rabbits.

Our lives are loosely based on Christ’s life.

A younger me would tell you that we will never grow old.

For now, I’ll just watch you

run in slow motion through an art museum

with a trash bag full of paintings.

I will dream of getting foolish with you

in a speedboat, wearing plaid flannel capes.

Put on something nice.

Both your clothes and the music.

But don’t forget who the star of this poem is.

Nate Hoil is a caretaker for clients with cognitive illnesses. You can find more of his work at natehoil.com.