This weeks poem prescription.

The Present

By Billy Collins

Much has been said about being in the present. It’s the place to be, according to the gurus, like the latest club on the downtown scene, but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.

It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible to wake up every morning and begin leaping from one second into the next until you fall exhausted back into bed.

Plus, there’d be no past with so many scenes to savor and regret, and no future, the place you will die but not before flying around with a jet-pack.

The trouble with the present is that it’s always in a state of vanishing. Take the second it takes to end this sentence with a period––already gone.

What about the moment that exists between banging your thumb with a hammer and realizing you are in a whole lot of pain?

What about the one that occurs after you hear the punch line but before you get the joke? Is that where the wise men want us to live

in that intervening tick, the tiny slot that occurs after you have spend hours searching downtown for that new club and just before you give up and head back home?

From William Seighart's Poetry Pharmacy.

My go to poetry book at the moment when I'm trying to make sense of it all. I thoroughly recommend this book.