He sleeps. Although the fate was to him strange,
He lived. He died when he no longer had his angel;
The thing just happened by itself,
As the night is when the day is going.

I have watched a man like you before
run down the street,
believing he would have withstood a better chance
if he had taken the bread in broad daylight-
it would have not been soaked with rain, nor
would there have been the loud crack of the pane breaking, nor
the way the loaf's scent was leashed about in the rain.

(When I walk alone at night and smell the pot houses,
it takes forty minutes to cover two blocks)

His likeness was captured in a local poet I knew, those sideburns
eclipsing the undersides of what I remembered. When I
fell beneath you,
you would pull the curtain of lank hair back with your thumbs to
        reveal them.

(The light on my cheekbones, the size of two closed eyelids)

If he were to escape into the night, with him would be
his curled up poem about his mother: "Mulberries," of which
nearly every woman in the audience fed upon.

(Thrushes eating themselves hoarse on mulberries)

And yet, not one door would be opened later to him-
No matching candlestick, no bag of spoons.

Not one would be willing to buy back his soul- Not I
and that is where his poetry came from.