caught

i am the
angel
that prepares people
to meet god

few of you get it right—
there is a plan, but it’s not
exactly fate.
here in the
birth and ending of people department,
we very rarely know more than a
few years in advance.

i
execute
the plan.
i’ve walked among people
shyly.

as she bounded with her arms across
the monkey bars and swung around with her knees
that let her shirt fall down around her chin
revealing the innocence and sameness of a child’s torso
i planted the small knot of tumor like a seed
in her brain that would slowly begin to
chew away at her
and bring her back

sometimes in this line of work
i get distracted

sometimes as i glide through the air
i cause the scattering of birds or
your kite string to break—

sometimes in the act itself i am caught
in your pictures—
nothing in them but a
faint and hazy orb of light.

self aware

I can’t get behind
poems
that know they are
poems.

when word meets sound
or stop means go
all just to sound like a poem,
I want to gag and scream
to the one who wrote it:

yes, yes, you are good with a pen.
we know.

good ideas are snobs, you know.
the pure ones, I mean.

they waltz in nice rooms and
scoff at cliché.

it takes a poet,
a good one,
to make them stop and
look into the glass that shows their flaws.

to humble them.

to make them soft and real and
above all else unassuming.