God was watching me that day I tossed
a long fluorescent bulb into a dumpster
and it broke on the hard metal edge
a mere foot from my face, exploding like
an atom bomb of powdered glass and shards,
none of which got into my eyes; but
the day a teen-aged boy swerved to hit me
on a Greenwich Village street in an
attempt to “clip a queer”, and his friends
laughed from their open windows as I fell,
and I lived, that was my own tenacity.