Silhouette of a Street Poet

we can’t do good to be remembered, we must do good in spite of being forgotten.
just as the dead cruise across the pristine grass
toward a dream that looks back at them ambivalently,
so too must we proceed without the comfort of guarantee.
let me retell my story:
I was thinking of the rain on the windows
in the clouds
when I was born in a droplet that pummeled into ground.
I wasn’t an angel, I wasn’t a god— I was just a raindrop
sipping on your shoe. you don’t know me anymore.
I don’t know you    anymore. we find out our lives
are plastic grocery bags
scuttling in the Target parking lot—
eaten by wind. we find there’s no elaborate course
out the mind, there’s nothing waiting
on the chain’s other side.
open up the hallways
and you’ll find the seasons died
in the fluorescent lights.
and something in the way the bulletin board
pales
will push me over the edge
til I read this poem on this street corner
in hopes my vacant breaths
may do better in a stranger’s hands-
that they may derive some good
from them.        and for a moment,
they’ll tilt their heads
the same way you did.