Take the opportunity to write as you cry

Take the time to photograph the moment

Don’t avert your eyes from the horror

Horror is art, death is beauty, love is a gift

To share

Use your heart to create something

Wring it out and catch what’s left

Put it in a bucket and swirl the gleaming mess

Filled with your life’s bitterness and dreams’ happiness

Pour it on paper

Let us all have a bit of it, offer it to us

So we can cry with you and smile with you and forget you

For something else

Play the song; make the strings of your guitar

Tremble with the ache of it, the need of it

Let us hear the agony in vibrato, let your voice shake

But hit the note, there’s no point if you can’t

It must sound beautiful, or it is wasted

Your heart may end up nothing but a damp organ barely beating

With its hope and needs and wants poured down the sewer

Of negative reviews and disappointed eyes

So make it beautiful.  Leave yourself with nothing

Give it all away and fill yourself instead

With another’s heartbreak, another’s desires and wants and smiles

Take them with you instead.

Let yourself have them and them, you