Improvements

You stop reading the news. If you can't change the state of things, you think, what use is there in knowing what they are? This brings you unexpected relief, which in turn makes you angry. 

On the page, a story you've twisted inside out begins to sound more like itself again. The same could be said for you, come to think of it. You know the solution when you're out of sorts is always to lace your running shoes or sharpen your pen and yet so often you fail to return to the witchcraft that never fails you. In the park, clovers swell into enormous verdure, but you have yet to stop and find a four-leaf. 

What could you possibly be doing with your time
that is more important than that?

A sense of mysterious joy is starting to spread through your appendages. Nothing ostentatious yet, nothing big enough to be reliable, but definitely there, definitely sparking. 

If you don't look directly at it, maybe it will come. If you feed it whatever crumbs of wonder you can find, maybe it will grow. Everything is almost, almost happening. 

All you have to do 
is hold on.  

Good Thing

How comforting Mondays in their clarity, in their reliable structure. Sunshine in the morning, to-do lists for breakfast, a respite from the droning of your mind. The questions seem smaller today, they don't cut as deep, only jab at your subconscious a little. 

You step into the bar, your Monday bartender on a long-awaited European vacation, an unfamiliar face behind the bar, friendly, but anonymous. She doesn't know you, doesn't know your order or your corner table. She plays Take Me Home, Country Roads and Red House Painters, and you welcome the novelty, like an unexpected burst of color in monotony, or like a spark of joy in the midst of safety. 

The only other patron leaves, it's just you and the bartender and Fine Young Cannibals, a comfortable silence. Doing things alone together.  On your fingers, you wear the wedding bands of three generations before you. Maybe it grounds you. The little glass cup that holds a tealight on your table turns out to be an old yogurt jar. 

This brings you no end of joy.  

That's more than enough
for now.  

In Perpetuity

The rain moves on but the weight lingers. You are as lost as ever, more questions by the minute, unraveling into the April chill. The radiators in your apartment bang on, the heat reviving long after it thought its season would be over. 

You say your apartment, but the truth is you have no home of your own.  

This is one of the questions that circle your drain and threaten to pull you down with it. 

But, you remind yourself, you have come out of ashes before. You have risen from the drag and built worlds around you that swirled itself into curlicues of joy. You have brought into existence experiences that did not exist before you conjured them. 

The last few eons have been a setback, 
I'll grant you that. 

But for all the times you've been lost in the woods, 
the woods have never killed you. 

There is still a chance that
there are curlicues left to be 
lived.  

Rain Dance

You tumble into an abyss of your own making, it's so easy to stumble when you think things are going well. Perhaps it's just the rain. 

It's often just the rain. 

You know there was a time when you wanted something out of life but you feel old now, old before your time, like you've already moved on to a version of yourself that has nothing left to do. You used to look for novelty on the horizon, and now you seem mostly to be longing for silence. 

It's time to change, you just don't know how. 

The only way to find out where you're going
is to start moving 
at all. 

Trailer Park

It feels like Friday long before you open your eyes, a day for fancy and whims, not for following a rat race run. So you stumble through the to do list, spend more of the day staring out the window to the cool sunshine a petal-snowed breezes. Count minutes until happy hours, until it's time to cross the river and feel that part of you realign as it only does on the island. Like you're always holding your breath just a little until you return to it. Spring always held such hope, you revel in it. 

You should revel in it, you know. You should let your imagination run away with you and your whimsy get the better of every turn. It's April now, it's spring now, you survive a whole year just to live in this moment, and it's not lost on you. 

You ask so often from gifts from the Universe. 

Don't you see they're in front of you? 

Chapter One

You return to your manuscript in the mornings, the start of each day bathed in a gift. It's all you ever want to do, you find your thoughts wander to magic at any break in the grind. This is how you were meant to feel. 

There is still hope between your lines, still a morsel of what you thought you might be nestled in your spinal column. The street outside is warm, sunny, spring bathes the city in a sort of peace, you live your life in novelty. 

It's an illness, 
sure. 

But you're no longer so sure you're looking
for a cure.  

Visions, Everything

Every day tired, so tired, was spring not meant for bursts of energy and joy? You think perhaps the end of the world is getting you down, your poverty is getting you down, the never-ending struggle of it all. It's getting old, not you. Ants are taking over your kitchen counter, but you almost haven't the heart to stop them. We're all just doing the best that we can. 

Rain returns to the Northeast, like April can't make up its mind and wasn't that always the way? April was made for torment, the hightest highs and the instant takedowns. Summer lies ahead, you know it does, but you don't want to rush it. The sooner it starts, the sooner it's over, and right now it all lies ahead. 

You think you could be truly happy if you always knew there was something good on the horizon. 

Think you could make it if only someone would promise you 
that somewhere along the line there would be

joy.