Last week, people, I posted the first stanza of The Consolations, the poem that, if I ever get another poetry collection published will be both the title poem and the first poem in the book. There's going to be a poem by that same name as the last poem in the theoretical collection. Here's the first stanza of that second version.

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The Consolations


12 October 2004

There were many.

There was poetry. Why lie?
It comforted me. Words
took on the terror. Hurt
took the place of my brother
hitting the street. Earth
took the place of the new distance
between him and myself.
Night was death, the moving
from feeling to unfeeling. Death
was itself, but on a page,
not in the world. I wrote poems,
they carried me across.