Stephen Dobyns

  A man decides to write a poem.

  Why not?  He's feeling good.

  He considers some choices.

  With a wink to grand guignol,

  he might spin a tale about a cute small pig,

  its drunken young assassin, and a hapless family man

  who should have known better yet set it all in motion.

  But he has no taste for pork today.

  He imagines a poem with two hardworking angels

  randomly flipping coins that, falling,  rocket downward

  to thin the population in a small American midwestern city

  when they hit someone and, ironically, has the new dead

  all unhappily joining heaven's long unemployment lines

  because heaven's halo factory has filled its three shifts.

 This offers all kinds of narrative possibilities.

  But, to be completely objective, it is a bit twee.

  Now, the man is feeling anxious as his imagination

  fills with ideas with no apparent limits and he crosses

  the boundary into the city of missed chances.