Have you tasted the bitterness of tears of despair?
Have you watched the sun sink through such pale, balmless air
that your soul sought its shell like a crab on a beach,
then scuttled inside to be safe, out of reach?

Might I lift you tonight from earth’s wreckage and damage
on these waves gently rising to pay the moon homage?
Or better, perhaps, let me say that I, too,
have dreamed of infinity . . . windswept and blue.

This poem about sympathy for someone contemplating suicide was originally published by TC Broadsheet Verses. I was paid a whopping $10, my first cash payment. It was subsequently published by Piedmont Literary Review, Penny Dreadful, the Net Poetry and Art Competition, Songs of Innocence, Poetry Life & Times, Better Than Starbucks and The Chained Muse.

Listen, now my friends, for I
shall let, the thought that like
an illness threads, laced through
all the causeways of my veins,
that in the moment, threatening
decay, boils, and begs relief;
that all men, and women living,
made in the plan of this wide
and tangled tapestry, seek and
humor themselves to be, each
woven separate, unique in form
and station, and about them hung
the universe, dependent for its
character on their sight, which
itself by their hearts temperament is due.
Life, the lives of others, serve the
merest backdrop, the stage that
is the foundation of our act, and
our struggles, illumined by
measure of their intimacy, seem
in their importance to swallow the
world, and cast all that does not
pertain in a veil of contempt, disinterest.
Yet the world, as in untrammeled
thought we realize, does not sway
according to ourselves, move
whether sweet or bitter, along the
course of our presumption. But in its
step it moves to the tune of its creation;
wholly nothing, never fair nor foul alone;
a pool, in which like ripples man's every
thought and action begins, grows, dies,
and is reborn. Seen now, free of leaning
and imprint, the brush's work broad,
shallow, a truth is opened, that wiser now
perforce we clutch to our *******; that of
the living, who suffer, there are those
who suffer more, or less than ourselves,
and to the former in the halls of memory we
can do naught but weep, so shut our eyes
and turn, pretending the point less sharp,
the dose less bitter, that our minds may fall
again to the pattern, and our eyes again look
outward. Walled so, is it a wonder that these lives,
these men and women, shaped as they are through
pain are found forgot, abandoned in the memory
of their minds, their hearts? But memory is the
root of empathy, sympathy; so remember, and in
whoso you meet light their memory also; for it
is only when record fails that man's erasure is
complete; nor will ever his life lose its meaning
while there is one alive to remember.