"Inside Out" by Diane Wakowski

Diane Wakowski is a very prolific contemporary poet. Her poetry is "frankly personal and wildly humorous, and expresses a mindset in stark opposition to Americans’ materialism and moralistic rigidity" (POL). She is professor emeritus at Michigan State University.

Inside Out 

I walk the purple carpet into your eye
carrying the silver butter server
but a truck rumbles by,
                      leaving its black tire prints on my foot
and old images          the sound of banging screen doors on hot 
             afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on 
             the sink
flicker, as reflections on the metal surface.

Come in, you said,
inside your paintings, inside the blood factory, inside the 
old songs that line your hands, inside
eyes that change like a snowflake every second,
inside spinach leaves holding that one piece of gravel,
inside the whiskers of a cat,
inside your old hat, and most of all inside your mouth where you 
grind the pigments with your teeth, painting
with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting
with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth.

You cannot let me walk inside you too long inside 
the veins where my small feet touch
bottom.
You must reach inside and pull me
like a silver bullet
from your arm.

This poem, in the absurd beat style that we've seen before, seems to describe the narrator's struggles with intimacy with a particular person. The strange language and form influences the reader's uncomfortable perspective, similar to the perspective of the narrator: "with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting / with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth." This is certainly not a romantic poem, and not a particularly descriptive poem, despite the unique word choice and imagery. It's a poem of expression and confusion; a jarring narrative of strange and probably disappointing interaction. 

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/176000