Out-Of-Body Experience Poem by Colm Keenan

Sometimes I scrutinize this bedsit:
shoes and runners pointing in different directions on floor;
red jacket strewn across arm of sofa;
an unmade bed, the sheets tossed about and ruffled from torturous sleep;
various books half-read;
a burnt saucepan steeping in sink;
washed-out tins of tuna on draining board.

I live among things.
I see things that have been moved around for one reason or another or none at all.
I step out from flesh to survey the innocence of movement, of purpose, of threads that unravel into one big knot.

There's a man living in this enclosure, a ghost.
We never meet.
We're not supposed to meet.

I look around this bedsit and sigh,
for the surface of self cannot be probed without distortion.