If you're at rock bottom

Here's a poem that has helped me, and, if you are at your lowest today, I hope it might help you too... To a Life in Despair

Don't. Don't go to the bridge.

Don't wake in your coat in the morning light

and carry those stones into the river.

Don't find your father's pistol

in the attic, hidden in the family albums.

Don't. Don't pour the pills

into the whiskey, the walls dissolving

like your childhood. Don't, just don't choose

not to wake.

Stay. Just stay.

Tell yourself you'll do it tomorrow.

You can always walk alone into the darkness.

But not yet. Not yet. Not this soon.

I don't have a reason

to give you. All I have

is the morning, and the autumn wind,

and the child you once were

in the darkness, looking at the new moon

through the ruins, saying

save me, save me, save me,

and the moon looking back

with her vacant

face

saying I promise, I stone-

cold promise

that the face of utter

hopelessness

is the face of something just about to change.

Joseph Fasano