just stay.

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” ………Virginia Woolf.

So, the writer looked out the window where glass froze into a shocked moment and all the kids were forced indoors and asked to read against the ember and the humans panicked because there was nothing left to do but shiver and chap but the writer remembered that imagination lifted enough weights to build a fire just out of memory.

within each human, find salt, stone and strength

It can be difficult to bend.

At a certain age, knees knock themselves out like aggressive boxers. And as soft as this earth is from its deepest breaths, what we rest on can be like crushed up graves, digging into available bones.

You will love more than once. There may even be some months or years where you love many. Some will live beside each other and then there are the ones who live on islands too far to contact through wires and wails.

When you find a pattern in your sadness, look to your left and the one who has remained may be referred to as planetary partner or moon dweller.

Never apologize for all that salt traveling from webbed sight. Humans are meant to float into the fissures of body’s drips.

Ignore doors and windows. Remain…even when exit signs tempt you with their neon wander.

It can be difficult to contort into the kind of person who survives especially when the night is far too angry to permit you sleep. But bend. And breathe. And stay. All of this aids the elastic in you.

an epidemic of suicidal

I never remember the first time; I can always recall the last.

It’s happening.

Younger and younger, humans are finding weaponry in order to flee from this earth that was supposed to seatbelt us in. Is it not tight enough to save us from our selves?

This earth made a promise to keep us warm, to keep us cold, to keep us. 

The humans are leaping off bridges and ledges and fire escapes. They are tying themselves away. They are flinging their organs into oceans and rivers. They are using bullets and powders and needles and starvation.

Have we run out of ways to scream help in the six thousand plus languages that exist?

I was fifteen. I was seventeen. I was nineteen. I was twenty-four. I was twenty-seven. I was thirty-four. There are band-aids and ointments. There are lovers that try to hold us in and there are medicines that try to numb us through. When I think about what has kept me here, I think of words:

father. poems. language. books. ink. the moon. 

But it doesn’t always just go away. We cannot just ignore the statistics and death notices. We cannot blame it on just one thing. So, what is the solution and how can we strap on restorative capes and save the ones who dangle.

*

In the summertime, I would wear long sleeves. I felt too defined by the scars that scraped away the anonymity of my past. When I started pushing the fabric up past my elbows, the questions would arrive. Lovers would ask me where the scars came from. Strangers wanted to know my pattern of cutting. I felt sarcastic and angry; I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want to give anyone the power of understanding me. 

Now, I answer. Sometimes I do not even wait for the questions; I respond to the graze of others’ fingertips against the raised wounds. I unravel the importance of speaking. There is no shame in wanting to die when one replaces that want with a stronger attempt at remaining.

This earth keeps losing its humans to sadness. There are accidents and disease and contagion and diagnoses. It’s the ones who leave without notice that make me want to speak my story out as loud as I can.

We will never be without trauma, but we can travel toward a place within ourselves where translation pushes the grey into something less imprisoned.

How to create an epidemic of survival.

there are oranges in the sky and they are seedless

It can be difficult to wake. Dreams are heavy like ten thousand words, typeset into body.

When there is another beside you, it can be easy to remain in bed. They hold you as though your organs will flail if they let go. Their smell is so familiar but when the sun lets loose in the sky, you must unfold and drift up.

Mornings can be a reminder of the day before or several years earlier when you had a porch and pup. Or when you floated boxed-wine in icy lake in the woods when camp-out lasted several days and home was referred to as: beyond the highest trees and past the boulders and before the mountain.

The bowl of fruit in the sky is ripening. There are kiwi and mandarin oranges and bananas and pomegranates and a few mangoes. We can call that other one tropical or traveled. There is so much to be eaten: humans & harvests & even the histories we collect.

It may be difficult to go on sometimes. What I mean is, sometimes death feels erotic and loving. How to tumble away from that ledge because here in the city, fire escapes are collapsing. Sometimes the sky sends out smoke signals to warn of this collapse; sometimes the sky forgets to notice.

to recall/ to regret/ to leave behind

There was nothing. There were no gasps or grunts from pain there was no pain. MOON follows you home because no one else desires so there is light there is light there is shape to this survival. MOON could only be your lover if you let go if you let go of regret of the restriction in your bend in your height in your existence as stationary. This love this love is unreachable. When did it happen. When did the moment occur when memories moved into billboards and shadows leaned against bicycle wheels and that time that time some other ghost pushed their way in and life is full of hauntings.

You leave behind sleep. Hunger. The sex of your body. You change your locks so that your hips forget where to come home to. You hold your hand because it feels lonely and pockets are so dark and looming. You kiss your wrist with dry space. Your veins have collapsed. Where is the blood where is the blood even your blood is gone.

Sometimes you know how to be human. You know all about manners and rhythm. You understand what words mean and the ones you never learned you ask another. You never brush your hair but you breathe. You remember climbing trees in August and that one that held you in a forest in Brooklyn to keep you here to keep you here.

(you must) Remain.