Dazed and Confused for so long it's not true....

Daphne auf Yupo - Daphne on Yupo 32 x 22 cm by Karin Goeppert

GRUNT

You didn’t actually jump

out of an airplane, you merely shuffled

till you ran out of floor, then you were

out there banging along the “skin”

of the aircraft, paralyzed

by a panic of such sublimity you’re unable

to remember what it felt like, silk opening

more or less horizontally,

saved again.

You hit the sand, brushed off,

took a leak, moved on to the tree line, shot an

azimuth—a compass reading, not a local animal—

even so you often got lost

in some awful swamp at Fort Polk, Louisiana,

in the poison ivy of Fort Benning, Georgia,

in the Columbian girls of the Canal Zone

at ten-bucks a pop the best bargain in town

got lost in them too, lost among civilians

at the National Gallery in D.C. who mocked you when

much too wasted on Mexican weed and Southern Comfort 

and something else which, symptomatically enough, you don’t  

remember, you looked at the pictures too up close and

slipped through the cracks of badly restored Old Masters

or the girl in Carmel who once said, unhappily, disgustedly

even, “Are you lost? I didn’t know people like you came here.”

Dazed and Confused - Led Zeppelin