IF I'VE EVER MADE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
i.
it wasn’t on purpose. when the boy swears god
loves me i think i have not even met the guy
but sure, i’d like to, so this is how i’ll spend
the impossible day, captive in a beater driving
down west market as he says look at all of this
gestures to a strip mall and tell me you don’t
believe in a creator
ii.
consider superglue. unintended headway penicillin
dynamite coca-cola champagne! wilhelm channels
a mystery ray and calls it x, not divine. a sparkling
current propels atom through atom, green disaster
blaze which deems the flesh extraneous, and the light
understands now. the broken particles, imagined,
dominated, even the intimacy too close as ghosts
of orderly black appear revealing what before
we’d had to bleed to know. sorry, sorry, what
had he been trying to do, again
iii.
i shouldn’t have been so hard on the strip mall. what
am i asking of it? it’s the point, anyway, that there’s sin
and miracle nothing else, and hey, i clock a robin folding
branches into the o’s of the sign on goodwill, where inside
someone buys a stranger’s blood-red confession
dress. i want the boy to define accident. then mistake.
for fun he’d rally creation and discovery, but look, i’d say,
don’t you feel it, when the sun casts shadows across
the ugliest parts of you, the senselessness, the stumbling,
our tipsy sleepwalk into ourselves, in the same instant
formed and found, and i blink the wet eyes that happen
to bore down to the marrow, looking for god, and discover
two-hundred off-white flecks of rubble, of what the earth
built with what was left of heaven.