Regret is like a Blue Dive

I know regret bakes hot.
It begins with coffee,
the supple drug
everyday like
firewood in your hands
birch, broken,
a slanted piece of wood stuck
in the knuckle ridge of your skin
that you carry on the NYC train running uptown
to share with your neighbor,
a stranger, so happy you are to not
live in a Jersey suburb but to eat cardamon
panna cotta and coffee and pretend
wealth, pretend youth, staring at
the bridges that all your favorite poets
threw themselves from and at least
once every few months you look up
how to hang yourself because it is actually hard
to snap your neck at the best angle and then
you feel shitty about it because there
was a boy, a student at the school where you
teach, who walked into a forest one day
and did not come out. Twenty
is such a fragile age.

You might have to deal with the fact
that you will never be a mother.
Let that sink in. You might have to acknowledge
that you might never have been
a very good one and so it is probably
no real loss and anyways, you read queer theory
and NO FUTURE or something like
no conceivable future though you’re pretty sure
you’ve conceived once or twice, that hot trail
of blood running to your knees on the hotel bathroom floor
in Milwaukee where you wondered if it was more than
what it was and the planet is swinging
outwards on a gravity vine and wouldn’t
be here for your grandkids anyways though you’re pretty sure
your grandkids would like the internet
and did you know if you google
how to hang yourself, the internet is kind.
I was surprised that the internet cared, rioting me
to hotlines, wooing me with titles like:
“If you only read one thing, read this” and I read it
and it actually wasn’t very good, not for me,
too mathematical, something about depression
on a scale of bending resources. I read Jack Spicer
instead and that helps except nothing helped Jack Spicer
when he drank himself into a San Francisco ward and I wonder
what percentage of people who read that article thought,
this math is the savage math that will save me.
Depression is an endless Quebec snowfield,
it is the Pacific Ocean in January, whaleless
and deep in soft, cold current.

Things that are brave are often painful and
I’m not sure why we do them, really, and things
that are brave don’t often look brave and maybe won’t
for two hundred years?
I forgot to say that in addition to not being a mother,
you might just be alone. Sit with that. Think of those
joys, the form of solo waltz you will dance around
your bedquilt, the trance of your morning drift,
how you will learn to make dinner just for one mouth,
how you will learn to feed only yourself
and how it will not be sad at all.