Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean Thing, fishhooks, barbs in your hand. But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable. Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous discards. Space for knickknacks, and for Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify. Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind that takes genius. Chasms in character. Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above a new grave. Pages you know exist but you can't find them. Someone's terribly inevitable life story, maybe mine.

William Stafford

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she'd tell me what to do. I handed her the twenty. She said, "Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon." The first psycho therapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn't stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth. Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness when they care more about what they give than what they get. The pharmacist said, "Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax." The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me forget what the trauma said. The trauma said, "Don't write this poem. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones." But my bones said, "Tyler Clementi dove into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone." My bones said, "Write the poem." The lamplight. Considering the river bed. To the chandelier of your fate hanging by a thread. To everyday you could not get out of bed. To the bulls eye of your wrist To anyone who has ever wanted to die. I have been told, sometimes, the most healing thing to do-- Is remind ourselves over and over and over: "Other people feel this too." The tomorrow that is coming, gone And it has not gotten better When you are half finished writing that letter to your mother that says "I swear to God I tried But when I thought I hit bottom, it started hitting back" There is no bruise like the bruise of loneliness kicks into the spine So let me tell you I know there are days it looks like the whole world is dancing in the streets when you break down like the doors of the looted buildings You are not alone and wondering who will be convicted of the crime of insisting you keep loading your grief into the chamber of your shame You are not weak just because your heart feels so heavy I have never met a heavy heart that wasn't a phone booth with a red cape inside Some people will never understand the kind of superpower it takes for some people to just walk outside Some days I know my smile looks like the gutter of a falling house But my hands are always holding tight to the ripchord of believing A life can be rich like the soil Can make food of decay Can turn wound into highway Pick me up in a truck with that bumper sticker that says "It is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society." I have never trusted anyone with the pulled back bow of my spine the way I trusted ones who come undone at the throat Screaming for their pulses to find the fight to pound Four nights before Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge I was sitting in a hotel room in my own town Calculating exactly what I had to swallow to keep a bottle of sleeping pills down What I know about living is the pain is never just ours Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo So I keep a listening to the moment the grief becomes a window When I can see what I couldn't see before, through the glass of my most battered dream I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds. So the next time I tell you how easily I come out of my skin, don't try to put me back in, just say "Here we are together at the window aching for it to all get better but knowing as bad as it hurts our hearts, made of only just skin, knowing there is a chance the worst day might still be coming-- let me say right now for the record, I'm still gonna be here asking this world to dance, even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet you--you stay here with me, okay? You stay here with me. Raising your bright against the bitter dark Your bright longing Your brilliant fists of loss" Friends, if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other, my God that's plenty my God that's enough my God that is so so much for the light to give each of us at each other's backs whispering over and over and over "Live" "Live" "Live"

Andrea Gibson

It was May. How had it started? What Had bared our edges? What quirky twist Of the moon's blade had set us, so early in the day, Bleeding each other? What had I done? I had Somehow misunderstood. Inaccessible In your dybbuk fury, babies Hurled into the car, you drove. We surely Had been intending a day's outing, Somewhere on the coast, an exploration-- So you started driving. What I remember Is thinking: She’ll do something crazy. And I ripped The door open and jumped in beside you. So we drove West. West. Cornish lanes I remember, a simmering truce As you stared, with iron in your face, Into some remote thunderscape Of some unworldly war. I simply Trod accompaniment, carried babies, Waited for you to come back to nature. We tried to find the coast. You Raged against our English private greed Of fencing off all coastal approaches, Hiding the sea from roads, from all inland. You despised England's grubby edges when you got there. The day belonged to the furies. I searched the map To penetrate the farms and private kingdoms. Finally a gateway. It was a fresh day, Full May. Somewhere I'd brought food. We crossed a field and came to the open Blue push of sea-wind. A gorse cliff, Brambly, oak-packed combes. We found An eyrie hollow, just under the cliff-top. It seemed perfect to me. Feeding babies, Your Germanic scowl, edged like a helmet, Would not translate itself. I sat baffled. I was a fly outside on the window-pane. Of my own domestic drama. You refused to lie there Being indolent, you hated it. That flat, draughty plate was not an ocean. You had to be away and you went. And I Trailed after like a dog, along the cliff-top field-edge, Over a wind-matted oak-wood-- And I found a snare. Copper-wire gleam, brown cord, human contrivance, Sitting new-set. Without a word You tore it up and threw it into the trees. I was aghast. Faithful To my country gods--I saw The sanctity of a trapline desecrated. You saw blunt fingers, blood in the cuticles, Clamped around a blue mug. I saw Country poverty raising a penny, Filling a Sunday stewpot. You saw baby-eyed Strangled innocents, I saw sacred Ancient custom. You saw snare after snare And went ahead, riving them from their roots And flinging them down the wood. I saw you Ripping up precarious, precious saplings Of my heritage, hard-won concessions From the hangings and transportations To live off the land. You cried: 'Murderers!' You were weeping with a rage That cared nothing for rabbits. You were locked Into some chamber gasping for oxygen Where I could not find you, or really hear you, Let alone understand you. In those snares You'd caught something. Had you caught something in me, Nocturnal and unknown to me? Or was it Your doomed self, your tortured, crying, Suffocating self? Whichever, Those terrible, hypersensitive Fingers of your verse closed round it and Felt it alive. The poems, like smoking entrails, Came soft into your hands.

It was a place of force-- The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, Tearing off my voice, and the sea Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead Unreeling in it, spreading like oil. I tasted the malignity of the gorse, Its black spikes, The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers. They had an efficiency, a great beauty, And were extravagant, like torture. There was only one place to get to. Simmering, perfumed, The paths narrowed into the hollow. And the snares almost effaced themselves-- Zeroes, shutting on nothing. Set close, like birth pangs. The absence of shrieks Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy. The glassy light was a clear wall, The thickets quiet. I felt a still busyness, an intent. I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt, Ringing the white china. How they awaited him, those little deaths! They waited like sweethearts. They excited him. And we, too, had a relationship-- Tight wires between us, Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring Sliding shut on some quick thing, The constriction killing me also.

There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. People so tired mutilated either by love or no love. People just are not good to each other one on one. The rich are not good to the rich, the poor are not good to the poor. We are afraid. Our educational system tells us that we can all be big-ass winners. It hasn't told us about the gutters or the suicides. Or the terror of one person aching in one place alone untouched unspoken to watering a plant.