understand this one thing:

your life is a divine poem.
meant to be played out amidst the heavenly bodies,
with all of their summits and troughs,
the vast open deserts of heat and exhaustion.
nobody is born any different,
we just choose to be so.


when your moments are few
you will not look back on the coins you didn't save.
you will recount the stars you beheld
and the glorious perspective the morning gave you
when you thought the night would never end.
you will remember the way drops of seawater ran down your face
and how you swallowed a few and inhaled a few more.
you will look with fondness on
the smell of fire and smoke captured in your clothes,
and the nights where you defined who you were
in front of yourself and no others.
you will remember the cold
and the heat-seeking wind,
extracting the life from your face;
your "poor" lips chapped on the face of the rock,
and your eyes barely opening against the frozen precipice.

should you consider suicide,
remember that nobody is asking you to leap to the end.
[in fact, nobody is asking anything of you at all.]
you are only required to step forward.
one step. the unknown lays before you.
and if, in your life-long poem, you find no more strength
for that one step- you find that step impossible to take-
remember how you were born in love, in life,
ready to kiss the cliffs and sing into the abyss.
leap off if you must,
but remember that you can always write one more line,
you can always take one more action.

and that's all you must do.

there are no more turtles in turtle bay.

the last one packed up his ****
and moved out just recently.
i think he was quoted in the paper
as saying, well this place
sure went straight to hell
… soon as those **** toads
started moving in here.

luckily, there wasn’t even 5 miles
until the next bay where
that turtle from before
could go to live with some
other people like him, resoundingly
intolerant of toads in any shapes
or
sizes.

he built a house for himself,
that turtle from before,
and found a wife who
was going through a rough patch,
employment-wise.
he gave her some good advice:
follow your heart because life is short.
[he was full of good slogans.]
they thought about having kids
[and tried]
but decided in the end
that they were better off
just the two of them.

one night she put a cigarette out
on his shell while he was asleep
and he woke up and screamed
what the hell did you do that for?!
and she fell over, passed out drunk.
[might as well be a toad, right?]
he coughed up a bit of slime,
but didn’t pursue the matter further.
he just laid her down on the bed,
and left without saying goodbye.

the road to tucson was quite long
and he was an amazingly slow walker.
and a few days later he hadn’t even
really gone anywhere because he
decided to stay for like two weeks
at his buddy’s across the street from High Dive,
some bar they always went to
if it was after 1 am.
[no special reason- just proximity.]

but there’s only so many
times someone can watch
“fear and loathing in las vegas”
before anyone is going to feel
like he spent that last twenty years
on acid and wasting every second.
so he begrudgingly moved out,
and bumped into his wife at the grocery store.

hey
i thought you were gone.
i was at Tino’s, but his wife is back now.
where was she?
her mother’s.
what was she doing there
house sitting- you remember her mom does that quilting contest every year?
oh.
do you remember that?
yea… listen why didn’t you tell me you tried to **** yourself?
what
mary saw you…
oh jesus
... through the window sitting in the garage with your car running a while.
no- what? i can’t believe we’re even talking about this
well, did you or didn’t you?
didn’t i what?
try to.
yes i tried to, but i didn’t expect mary to be watching or anything.
why
no reason
why
i did it- i was just, tired
[...]
don’t you think it’s funny the way we eat out on wednesdays? every wednesday we always eat out
i have to go, actually
i didn’t mean anything
goodbye


eventually, the turtles moved back to turtle bay,
when a pet shop moved in there
around seventeen years later.
[you know, turtles do live very long]
and that turtle from before
solitarily revisited his homeland.

I drink the hot tea,
but I do not taste it.