Career Choices Poem by Matt Ransom

I might live in the trees
and study the survival techniques
of living off pine nuts
and whatever else pokes through the snow

But I will not be a a street person
I could not make a career of
babbling in the back of the bus
and asking for spare change

Or I could study the physics
of falling bodies from high places
far away
from where anyone can find them

But I will not be a street person
shivering in the glare
of a patrol car's searchlight
neither alive nor dead