Rising

Is it good or right

to treat despair with poetry

and walking round 

and round in the boneyard

with the dead

and plunging into water

where the river is 

swiftest.

I chant in my own head

look at the results 

if you are not dying 

each day then 

it is working

if you are climbing

up from the darkness

then who cares if your 

nails are breaking

or if your heart 

is breaking.

The difficulty of it 

is not what hurts

it is the cold of the human world

that cuts like the wind

in my bones 

I would rather be 

lashed by branches

or fall down and bruise myself 

on the rocks 

then be cut by other people

with their razor tongues

and their turned shoulders.