The hardest part of living

Being a poet sometimes puts you at the mercy of life; and life is not always merciful. ~ James Wright

At The Mercy Of Life

Let’s get something straight from the start:
Life guarantees only a successful exit. All
other considerations are negotiable, or not,
impressed by fortune and favor, subject
to the tyranny of its own imperious terms.

This one was lucky, we might say, or That
one was doomed to survive his own good
fortune. Life unfolds itself from a misshapen
knot of future into what we would be forced
to embrace were we not seeking the contrary.



Some might call it predisposition and they
would not be incorrect. One encryption after
another arrives and renders through tangles
of wire we bind ourselves with, each message
holding only some of the crucial data.

So we fill in the gaps by guesswork, caulk
fissures of happiness or misery with pliant
fictions we know are not the truth, but hold
them anyway as if not picking them up might
prove to be an anchored feather in the sky.

And we cannot shut the sky. It will do as it
will, with and without us. Let this not be
mistaken for that and that not be any more
than this. We come, in time, to learn the
hardest part of living are the memories.

Joseph Gallo
December 13, 2011