deus ex machina

I think of things sometimes
that I almost got myself into:
the twenty year mortgage,
the five year graduate school,
the boy who loved my drinking tactics
but never once approached my brain.
There is a certain, special rhythm to these remembrances:
the sweaty palms, the heart palpitations,
the unanimous body shivers of near death and dismemberment
then that single, enduring cry,
“Oh, thank you, God.”
If anything has ever made me believe
in an Omnipotent Being
my thriving scrapbook of divine interventions
has kept the gun to my head on this one.
Historical analysis will show
that this girl has had some close calls
with contractual misery, mainstream America
and an impressive resume, some very close calls.
There have been times my mind flew out of grandeur
and went looking through the want ads
to see how it is exactly that people manufacture happiness.
These times are best defined as gaping, cavernous,
monolithic lapses in consciousness,
whole months of my life
spent in the endeavor of pretending
that I could devote my being to a bellicose boy
on Wall Street, whole months of my life
spent faking joy over subjecting my creativity
to kissing the voluptuous ass of the professorial unit.
Then there would be that something:
that hypnotic leaf falling in front of me on Madison Avenue,
that line from Rilke regurgitating through my head
that would Jesus-Christ me, radically redeem me,
single-handedly save my sellout soul.
I have an entire track record of paranormal intervention:
surreal stories of salvation from cracks in ice cream cones
and the butcher’s smile in the supermarket.
Guardian angels, blitzkrieg enlightenments
and supernatural happenstance have, by comparison,
dwarfed any reliance on my questionable common sense.