TO EMBRACE ANOTHER RAINBOW

NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS NOT SO MUCH A POEM ABOUT SUICIDE AS IT IS A POEM ABOUT HOPE AND ABOUT LOVE. IT WAS WRITTEN OBVIOUSY DURING A VERY DARK TIME IN MY LIFE (BEFORE THE ANTI-DEPRESSANTS KICKED IN!) AND I NOTE THAT I AM STILL HERE TODAY, DOING QUITE WELL, THANK YOU. BUT IF YOU ARE FEELING SUICIDAL, PLEASE CALL THE NATIONAL SUICIDE PREVENTION HOTLINE AT 1-800-273-8255. AND REMEMBER TO EMBRACE THE RAINBOW!

TO EMBRACE ANOTHER RAINBOW

Sometimes it’s all too much,
Here at the end of what I call life,
Here at the ebb of what I used to call my powers.
The ingratitude of my fellow man,
The dwindling of my useful hours.
Sometimes it’s all too much,
Living here in the darkness of my brain,
Substantia nigra deteriorating,
Cells dying in a blackening rain.
How much of my sadness is real
And how much a mirage?
How much is my imagination, how much a façade?

Do people care as little as they sometimes appear,
Leaving me lost in my maze of dread and fear.
And if I were to take a razor blade
And slide it up and down my wrist
And end it all right here and now,
Would my death then have a special twist,
And give anyone a moment’s pause.
To wish they had been kinder somehow
To me and my sensitive soul in its final sensitive hours?

Sometimes it’s all too much and I feel unloved by anyone,
And nothing I do is ever enough to bring back the renegade
sun.
Sometimes the joy arrives too late to ever have a chance
And sometimes the tango dancer leaves you in the middle of the dance.

Sometimes I think too irrationally to see any light at all
And long to pack it in too soon before the night should fall too hard.
My heart a broken crystal, nothing left but useless shards,
To be swept up in some tired dust bin, laid to rest like final ashes.
My former self a distant memory, a few random brilliant flashes,
That flickered and burned out like some hapless fuse.
An empty vessel no one sails on or even cares to use.

Sometimes it’s all too much, and I feel that razor on my wrist,
And heaven’s just a slice away, gleaming bright like an amethyst.
Sometimes it’s all too much, and it’s only that I love you so,
That I care to live another day, to embrace another rainbow.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2008
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED