Around the Room with Nooses

High school guidance class, talk on suicide

Statistics, asked to look around the room

Inside knowing I am the one in this row

They should be looking at

Like a hornet stung hand throbbing at the ready

Numbed for twenty years with depression

Opiate beyond the alcohol or injections

Low expectations for what the day has to bring

To get by, to fill the thimble with what counts as better

Evaluated like desert water or arctic sun

The measure to prolong the death knell

For just one more hour in a day spinning the vial

To not pour blood or oxygen into a noose

To see bedroom sheets as layers one will wake from

Rather than surrender to as Alice pulls the rug

A man just keeps falling and falling

The darkness like a comfort in its infinite possibility

To pause in a parking garage walkway at thirty-six

Take a breath in the breeze and believe

Change is possible

The lightness and darkness chasing headless chickens

Colliding like protestors knowing death is preferable than continuing

To subsist under such regimes 

Hope in the numbers that if yesterday was manageable  

Today might be completed

Add a kernel of sand from that beach to carry to the summit of that mountain

Far enough, has to be far enough

In this minute, for this try

If not well fuck it, just fuck it all slit the vein and let the crows drink,

But not there yet, not there yet

Still looking around the room finding a few words to write, maybe say

Maybe learn, maybe read, maybe change