carter billingham: a poem

hard to believe it, but that guy's
got a square pattern on his tie.
leaving the house in that state,
ignorant of his wrongdoing (fate
having long-ago doomed him to live
unaware), he'd assumed that the worst of
his problems would be the weather. there
was no way he could have known (again,
fate) the cosmic mistake he'd made or
how they'd end up taking it, the ones who
knew, the ones whose reasoning was right,
true, correct. the ones on whose opposite
end are the men on the street corners, who
spend all their time yelling about how god is furious with us and
satan is real.