April is Poetry Month Acid In Jakarta, among the vendors of flowers and soft drinks, I saw a child with a hideous mouth, begging, and I knew the wound was made for a way to stay alive. What I gave him wouldn't keep a dog alive. What he gave me from the brown coin of his sweating face was a look of cunning. I carry it like a bead of acid to remember how, once in a while,you can creep out of your own life and become someone else- an explosion in that nest of wires we call the imagination. I will never see him again, I suppose. But what of this rag, this shadow flung like a boy's body into the walls of my mind, bleeding their sour taste- insult and anger, the great movers? Mary Oliver