If it is a small heartbreak, drink three cups of tea
and smoke five cigarettes. Just for effect.
Keep a bottle of wine on the bedside table
and some aspirin tablets.
Just in case.
Read poems about despair.
Go for a run. Think of Murakami.
Then, Sontag, Woolf, Plath and of course Kafka.
Kafka doesn't judge.
He believes in unretractable destruction,
loves despair and juxtaposes it with hope.
Imperfect solidarities.
Flip the pages, make notes, sip wine or coffee.
Become God and take control. Don’t watch self-help memes on social media.
Although I think God did relinquish control eventually because
we are such a doomed species.
Heartbreaks are stimulants
for writers or those pretending to be one who wakes up looking for material
scratching their heads and staring at empty screens of their computers to frame a perfect love story.
We place ourselves in the way of the lava that volcanoes vomit to understand and repeat experiences.
Say ‘why not' and go for it. You won’t die.
As we set out to gather fireflies
taking tea breaks to process the aftermath of any ending,
as we pack the fireflies in a glass jar
hoping they'd swim in the air
exploding into sparks if you tapped the jar,
we pack heartbreaks
to ignite words, string them, etc.
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Writing is a strange profession.
The story is in the thing as
Lucia Berlin says.
They all died young.
All these disruptors.
All these women who wrote.
One blew up her head in an oven.
The other placed her head over towels
so that she would look gorgeous in her self-created death plot.
BTW did you get anywhere
you thought you could
by being tied to the this and that
of status quo situations.
They have invented a few to describe modern love’s dilemmas. Situationship, ghosting, gaslighting, etc.
To write about any of those is to abandon all hope.
Instead, pick up Raymond Carver’s books and think about the man in that story called Why Don't You Dance who had the garage sale and danced to mourn the ending of his love story.
Heartbreaks are better than situationship.
That word looks so emotionally bankrupt. That word called situationship.
Be grateful it is a heartbreak.
There’s scope for poetry there.
