When your bones feel
like marionette limbs
drooping, giving way to
gravity’s daily pull –
When you feel like you’re not really
connecting with anyone and
every conversation is a long
drawn yawn into the fog –
When your days spill
across the hard stone floor
like cold grey marbles –
Try and take a moment,
this moment
and kill yourself.

In your mind,
of course.

Gently or violently,
whatever feels right.
Maybe you keel
over your chair
onto that same stone floor,
hands clutching your chest
in dramatic display, your own
cardiac opera.
Or slip your fingers
across the cool metal of a revolver
hidden in an imaginary shoebox
at the back of your closet –
if that’s your speed, of course.
Simply kill yourself.
Let your mind go wild with it,
it’s your turn to take a bow, after all.
Big or small,
a drop of poison,
a dramatic flop
out of a second story
window, a kiss of
lead –

And now.
Now that we’re good
and gone
and our slates are sanitized –
Now. In this next moment,
come alive again.
Sit up off the floor,
straighten your pants,
pick up the phone or book
you’ve been drifting though
and breath in these next
moments,
these plump newborn
moments.

How would you walk
into the kitchen now,
on the wings of your
spectacular resurrection?
How grateful would you be to see
the incandescent smiles
of the ones you love?
The mother of pearl
dances across my daughter’s
fingertips, her laugh cracking
the sky wide open for me
once again.
When she was three
she had a little lisp,
she called it
free.

So now –
without making
any grand declaration
to those around you,
you get to descend from heaven
into your own post-ordinary life
once more.
But in a way that treats it
with the care and gratitude
you let slip away.
Now, you get to call back
all those lost parts of yourself
and live in them anew,
in a wiser, more experienced way,
instead of wasting yet
another day
another minute,
in pointless competition
with the past.

Nobody Reads Poetry

Rebirth