It is usually best to avoid
crushing hopelessness, to swerve
and defer disaster, but even so
the world is well and truly ****** up.

Seek solutions to this conundrum.

Try to avoid curiosity, a pernicious
strain of insanity that conjures up
irrational fears of orangutangs
with meat cleavers, lethally ascetic
Tibetan monks, bathroom carpets
of abandoned razors or Big Macs
rife with E. Coli.

Avoid metaphysical musings that lead
to questions of coleslaw, vegan
water parks, the Team Quadraplegic
Gymnastics squad and the horrors
of the Hilary Clinton Naked Network.

Seek refuge in the present tense to
escape the interrogation of mirrors,
the crafted answer, dacryphilia,
remedial rage, landslides of therapy
and memorizing each month's horoscope.

Consider that mercy is on back order from God.
Remember the best lines of an unread book.
Nap on a battlefield; haggle over imaginary debts.
Set fire to the umbrellas of passing strangers.
Stop to watch the loudness and burn the recovered dead.

Call up new magic for a dying world.
Find beauty in the irradiated glow of burning cities.
Try not to bounce existential checks or notice
the crumbling of distant walls, ruined outhouses,
and the immense bleakness of forever and ever.

Take up training small rodents and lighting holy fires.
Ignore the broken stars, long dead and beyond grief.
Discover the pleasure in erasure, enjoy the biology
of strangeness. Walk many miles without a map
beneath innumerable ladders carefully detouring
around immense flocks of rabid cassowaries.
Throttle the recalcitrant blue sky's silent throat.

Listen to the melody of car wrecks and smashed guitars.
Abandon assumed corpses to dreams of endless cold.
Appreciate futures you cannot believe in but never visit them.
Learn to diagram sentences in Esperanto then speak with toads.
Ignore the slot machine odds against your deepest desires.
Hide beneath the ravenous trees from time's famished maw.
Seek sanctuary in toothy optimism and complete amnesia.

Follow these impossible instructions to the letter
and you will become non-valent, invisible, immune
and no longer notice the world is ****** up
beyond redemption. Go on, give it a try.

  ~mce

     "Sit in my hand."
I'm ten.
I can't see him,
but I hear him breathing
in the dark.
It's after dinner playtime.
We're outside,
hidden by trees and shrubbery.
He calls it hide-and-seek,
but only my little sister seeks us
as we hide
and she can't find us,
as grandfather picks me up
and rubs his hands between my legs.
I only feel a vague stirring
at the edge of my consciousness.
I don't know what it is,
but I like it.
It gives me pleasure
that I can't identify.
It's not like eating candy,
but it's just as bad,
because I had to lie to grandmother
when she asked,
"What do you do out there?"
"Where?" I answered.
Then I said, "Oh, play hide-and-seek."
She looked hard at me,
then she said, "That was the last time.
I'm stopping that game."
So it ended and I forgot.
Ten years passed, thirtyfive,
when I began to reconstruct the past.
When I asked myself
why I was attracted to men who disgusted me
I traveled back through time
to the dark and heavy breathing part of my life
I thought was gone,
but it had only sunk from view
into the quicksand of my mind.
It was pulling me down
and there I found grandfather waiting,
his hand outstretched to lift me up,
naked and wet
where he rubbed me.
"I'll do anything for you," he whispered,
"but let you go."
And I cried, "Yes," then "No."
"I don't understand how you can do this to me.
I'm only ten years old,"
and he said, "That's old enough to know."

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that's where I'm floating,
and that's what it's like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

When I see things that is so inhumane
I just have to close my eyes, and shake my head
I am part of a team there,
but I am not happy to be on board
A failing system that’s ruthless
So I put on my gloves,
and do as much as I can
Else I would be living that lie.

When I see things that is so inhumane
I just tighten my jaws and shake my head
To the things that disgust me the most
I burn incense as a symbol of prayer for the helpless

There was no better place
for me to stay
than at the bottom of
your “to do” list.

But the single fact that
you took the time to
pen me in through
the various instances
of your day.

Well.
That’s love enough
for me.