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.