Ecclesiastes

The trick is that you’re willing to help them.
The rule is to sound like you’re doing them a favor.

The rule is to create a commission system.
The trick is to get their number.

The trick is to make it personal:
No one in the world suffers like you.

The trick is that you’re providing a service.
The rule is to keep the conversation going.

The rule is their parents were foolish,
their children are greedy or insane.

The rule is to make them feel they’ve come too late.
The trick is that you’re willing to make exceptions.

The rule is to assume their parents abused them.
The trick is to sound like the one teacher they loved.

And when they say “too much,”
give them a plan.

And when they say “anger” or “rage” or “love,”
say “give me an example.”

The rule is everyone is a gypsy now.
Everyone is searching for his tribe.

The rule is you don’t care if they ever find it.
The trick is that they feel they can.

Khaled Mattawa

from Tocqueville
New Issues Poetry & Prose

“the lanyard” by billy collins

“the laughing heart” by charles bukowski
read by tom waits

The Laughing Heart

Charles Bukowksi

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

“there’s this part that makes you feel full” – DFW

poem of the day from poets.org

Having it Out with Melancholy
by Jane Kenyon

If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.

A. P. CHEKHOV The Cherry Orchard

1 FROM THE NURSERY

When I was born, you waited
behind a pile of linen in the nursery,
and when we were alone, you lay down
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.

And from that day on
everything under the sun and moon
made me sad — even the yellow
wooden beads that slid and spun
along a spindle on my crib.

You taught me to exist without gratitude.
You ruined my manners toward God:
“We’re here simply to wait for death;
the pleasures of earth are overrated.”

I only appeared to belong to my mother,
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases.
I was already yours — the anti-urge,
the mutilator of souls.

2 BOTTLES

Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin,
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax,
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft.
The coated ones smell sweet or have
no smell; the powdery ones smell
like the chemistry lab at school
that made me hold my breath.

3 SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND

You wouldn’t be so depressed
if you really believed in God.

4 OFTEN

Often I go to bed as soon after dinner
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away
from the massive pain in sleep’s
frail wicker coracle.

5 ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT

Once, in my early thirties, I saw
that I was a speck of light in the great
river of light that undulates through time.

I was floating with the whole
human family. We were all colors — those
who are living now, those who have died,
those who are not yet born. For a few

moments I floated, completely calm,
and I no longer hated having to exist.

Like a crow who smells hot blood
you came flying to pull me out
of the glowing stream.
“I’ll hold you up. I never let my dear
ones drown!” After that, I wept for days.

6 IN AND OUT

The dog searches until he finds me
upstairs, lies down with a clatter
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing
saves my life — in and out, in
and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . .

7 PARDON

A piece of burned meat
wears my clothes, speaks
in my voice, dispatches obligations
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying
to be stouthearted, tired
beyond measure.

We move on to the monoamine
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night
I feel as if I had drunk six cups
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder
and bitterness of someone pardoned
for a crime she did not commit
I come back to marriage and friends,
to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back
to my desk, books, and chair.

8 CREDO

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work
but I believe only in this moment
of well-being. Unholy ghost,
you are certain to come again.

Coarse, mean, you’ll put your feet
on the coffee table, lean back,
and turn me into someone who can’t
take the trouble to speak; someone
who can’t sleep, or who does nothing
but sleep; can’t read, or call
for an appointment for help.

There is nothing I can do
against your coming.
When I awake, I am still with thee.

9 WOOD THRUSH

High on Nardil and June light
I wake at four,
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air
presses through the screen
with the wild, complex song
of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment.
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye.

From Constance by Jane Kenyon, published by Graywolf Press. © 1993 by Jane Kenyon. All rights reserved.

I don’t really know what else to say about it or where I would even begin. When I finished it, I just sat there and stared at the blank space on the lower half of page 981. I had known the end was coming. I’d read the last footnote with eager regret. I had often thumbed to 981 with a twinge of doubt that I would ever reach it (I had started IJ at least 3 times before). I texted Abdul who had finished it the previous week and while waiting for his response, I realized I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

I closed the book. I reopened it to the first page and started reading it again.

When Abdul responded he suggested I do exactly what I had done and then said the most perfect thing: “I feel like the story is just starting and I’m starving for more of that world.”

Dream Song 29
by John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

John Berryman, Dream Song 29 from The Dream Songs.
Copyright © 1969 by John Berryman

The Country
by Billy Collins

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time -

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

Valencia has a seemingly effortless way of bringing the reader straight into the story: “I peeled away green painter’s tape from around the light socket and flicked the switch,” (45). Her tactile imagery alongside this everyday action makes me feel the tape under my own fingers. And later on my toes curl at this: “I dried off and walked downstairs without any clothes on. I never did that. I didn’t care that the back window had no curtain, that there were nails and sawdust on the floor, that a snake’s den of cable hugged the walls,” (47). I feel as though I am walking with her on that bare floor,welcoming the idea of physical pain to subside the emotional.

The story flashes between home renovations shows she becomes addicted to, fond and not so fond memories of the boyfriend (though even the fond ones give us glimpses of what is to come: while the two are racing another couple in canoes, “You steered sloppily, holding us back, but I kept counting”), not wanting to rid the house of him and then desperately trying to rid the house of him (46).

In the midst of finding hidden bottles and recalling fights, Valencia details a gentler moment: “I wished you had always been with me. That’s why I hung onto you us for so long, because of that moment when you loved me so perfectly,” (47).

Valencia weaves an undercurrent of change and possibility into each aspect of the story, you can choose not to get sober, you can add more storage space to accommodate the accumulation of your life, or you can start over, clean up. Even then, so concerned with what could be, you forget what is. She reminds us this can be a matter of our perspective: “You hated the chain link fence until I pointed out the visual depth. We weren’t constricted by the six-foot high wooden fences,” (48). We get to choose to see things the way they were or maybe, in a way, still are: “If you stood at the base of our pear tree, you could see an entire row of fruit trees – cherry, peach, apple – a stretched outline, a secret orchard in the city,” (48).

The final passage brings us into the garden, into the melting snow revealing items thought lost, and Valencia considers what she had found, what she could turn it into, and what it truly had been: “What was the yard like before these brick houses, garages and alleys? On the edge of this great lake, was there still a forest of tree roots under my feet?” (50).

And I didn’t even touch on the blue part… read it for yourself: “Blue” appears in the Fall issue of the Canadian journal PRISM international.