Current Track: Blabb
KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

Do not call me an angel, when I'm gone.

Mourn me, revere me—or not, as you choose—
But as the human person that I was.


An angel is a pure celestial thing

Too absolute and too ethereal

For earthly things like woe or weariness,

For home and hearth, for hunger, or for sex.

And thou shalt not imply that all of these

Were alien to me, to what I was.

To do so would set up a painted prop,

A graven image, false and hypocrite.

To point to it, to call it by my name

Would be to say, such purity was his

That if thou lack it, thou canst have no part

Of what he was, nor can he have of you.


An angel is a moral paragon.

Of such unalloyed goodness that no man

Could hope to be the like. I hope I have

Done good, on earth, but I have lived on earth

Most evil, and made choices on my way

With no foreknowledge where those paths might lead.

And thou shalt not craft of my memory

A movable goalpost, with which to say

Such innocence as his I cannot see

In these cold latter days, and none now live

Who do deserve the mercy or the help

That he deserved and yet was not vouchsafed...

And never mind who did vouchsafe him not.


An angel is all incorruptible.

As timeless, as eternal even as

The stars themselves are not.

It has no past, no future, only an

Eternal patient present, without end.

That you read these words now proves I was not.

That my days were both limited and brief

And shall not come again. The things I would

Have done in them are largely left undone,

And now they never shall be. Thou shalt not

Suppose away responsibility

By saying, oh, in some brave afterword

He may yet have the happiness and joy

That his one chance to taste in this passed by.

Those things that I will never, now, behold— 

A welcome, Justice, Peace, the Northern Lights— 

Are lost to me. And what now can I say,

But Father in Sunset, Forgive them not!

For they did know exactly what they did.


An angel is a thing beyond the ken

Of humankind. It needs, if needs it has,

We know not what and could not comprehend.

And nothing of the things that we must have—

And which it is injustice, of the kind

That crieth out for vengeance, to deny—

Does any angel need. I was not so.

I needed much the same as any man.

A home. A place beside the hearth. A bed.

Food, shelter, all the hierarchy's known

To anyone who needs likewise as much.

No doubt the lack of one or more is why

I am no longer with you, I would guess

Tis not the least mysterious. I lived.

I loved. I had a right to live. And thou

Shalt not pretend that's hard to understand.

And so then justify the next neglect,

The next rejection, the next needless death

That you will then call “Angel" to forget.


So call me not an angel, when I'm gone.

You owe an angel nothing. I, at least,

Am owed the truth of who and what I was.