Is this frequent wish wretched, this desire for death

repulsive and macabre?  I do not seek to spill my blood

upon a table of sorrow and pity—would the gesture touch

Christ, somehow, like Stephen's forgiving cries and knowing

blessed destruction?  I simply do not fear the wound

of sleep; I wake to a blistering sun, hours old and already growing flowers,



And I writhe into a routine of the perpetual tack, with its flowery,

cloying thickness of inevitable defeat.  I would rather die

than arise once more to the gawking wound

of precedence.  Stephen cried but did not bleed

in fear or empathy: "They do not know

what they are doing!"  On whose side am I?  I would rather touch



the heart of a widow than write a thousand words that touch

No one.  She is last, then she is Christ, flowering,

blooming into all of the motherless children and shivering strangers who don't know

when they will eat again, starving to death

on street corners, decomposing into cardboard and blood.

These strangers will nourish Heaven with their lives, wounded



And wrapped in newspapers, scraps of fabric wound

like swaddling around numb hands that, although cold to the touch,

kindle a fire the world has never noticed.  Their blood

may run cold, but fire is in their veins.  If they bring flowers

to the widow, then it was Christ all along, doubled over and dying

of AIDS.  We punish the stranger while Stephen whispers, "They do not know…"



Gnostic vagabonds worship cheap vodka for the knowledge

of how to stay warm without a fire—it can also treat wounds

of the flesh and the heart.  I feel embarrassed when I pry for them; the Angel of Death

would laugh at my pleas of intercession, would not be touched

by my comfortable flutter of consideration.  My weeds are strange flowers

to my homeless brothers—what right have I to be thankful for this bloodline?



It is clear that we must make it right, must spill blood

to warm their cold hands, yet it will not wash away, I know.

Stephen was not afraid to die because his blood watered holy flowers

stained, too, with retribution.  He was Christ wounded

by the angry stones of the guilty in their glass homes, untouchable

in piety.  The vagrants must know that it was theirs, this death.



I do not pray for a better life, but that they would be touched

by the wound that bled for them; when they die I will

bring flowers to the empty street corners, knowing who was once there.