It’ll be a spectacular, five-star hotel of death
with every amenity imaginable: twelve live rattlesnakes,
a blender, flesh-eating bacteria.
You can be mauled beyond recognition by werewolf pups. 
There can be complications in the surgery.
A high-energy solar flare.
A rapture. E. coli in the lettuce. 

I don’t understand why you’d want to die,
so, I’ll offer one last option:
                                     you can also go on living.

Wine and good friends and singing.
A clean bed to sleep on and all the tempests subsiding.
There are enough cataclysms.
This time can be different. 

In this yet-to-be-written poem, if it pleases you,
you can bend spoons with the power of your mind. 
It’s easy. Watch—I’ll write it now:

‍ ‍Then you walked into the kitchen
‍ ‍and bent a tablespoon using nothing but the power of your mind.

You could do this.
You could be transcendent.
You could be a pterodactyl or a forklift.
I might promise anything to keep you intact.

At night, I bring my wife a cup of water
and two capsules of citalopram.She is trying to live.
We go over her schedule. We plan a future.
We are very careful.

Her therapist calls me,
worried, each time she doesn’t show up.

Already, there are so many stories that end badly.
The story with the gun in its mouth and its eyes closed.
The story with its feet on the ledge and the angels
trilling in the winds below.

The story I was friends with
who became the phone call that woke me last week,
the text message from a number I didn’t recognize,
the obituary in a town I’d never been to
with one motel and one stoplight
and so few reasons left to stay.

But this story can be up to you.

We can fix what must be fixed.
This is possible. I tell myself that.

This is the narrative I want to believe:
not all things end in ruin,
and you don’t have to die if you don’t want to.