But after my wife died at the end of
a long nasty slide down a rusty
no-cure-known-and-too-rarefor-any-research-dollars-to-look-for-one
deathsentence illness, and I decided
screw it I’ll just sit in the corner
and wait for the bus because I don’t think
I could manage to keep it together again
if I cared for someone again
and they died like that again,
and just before my son dropped dead
one day for no apparent reason
that the coroner could ever determine,
an angel from the past showed up
in the older but !! flesh, and my heart
leapt like nobody but Michael Jordan ever.

And I was so in love again that
there was no time to think about
staying on the bench at the bus stop

when there was this whole new ballgame
with me in it, on the A team,
and I accepted that life
is good stuff and bad stuff
and is what is: so, if it is Tuesday

it is best to write about what is on Tuesday.
Which tells me that the people who write
those oh-look-at-sufferin’-me poems,
and the people who read them
and go ooh-aah, isn’t that special,
must somehow like walking around
under a black cloud, and may have forgotten
that some silver linings can float by;
so as far as I’m concerned, even if
you can’t count on a happy ending
you can sometimes have
a damn happy Tuesday.