Make Room

Incant Against Suicide
by Mary Karr, from Viper Rum

Buy neither gun nor blue-edged blade.
Avoid green rope, high windows, rat
poison, cobra pits, and the long vanishing point
of train tracks that draw you to horizon's razor.

Only this way will another day refine you.  (Natural death's
no oxymoron) Your head's a bad neighborhood:
Don't go there alone, even if you have to stop
strangers to ask the way, and even if

spiders fall from your open mouth.
This talk's their only exit.  How else
would their scramble from your skull

escape?  You must make room first
that the holy spirits might enter.  Empty
yourself of self, then kneel down to listen.