But you can’t start there. You must start with something small and easier to manage, like melancholy. Three parts cardamon, a few shadows, the water collected from a rainy day. Even unrequited love is easier, as its base is a simple puree of popped off dandelion heads. Or young love which is a soup of daisies. But joy requires that which is the opposite of joy. The suffering of a wild thing. A broth of broken and healed bones. The smell of a dank basement. To accept what one must overcome. For only after, in the letting go of all the hurt the world makes have meaning, in the going on from grief, in the lack of retrospection, can we sip the broth of psalms, and inhale the aroma of our release—
Sean Thomas Dougherty's most recent book is the autobiography in prose poems Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions.