Old Story

Art : Winston Chmielinski

You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen


to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

- Mary Oliver from her poem Dogfish