sing anyway

 (No, it is not Poetry Friday, but someone shared this with me and thought it too marvelous to keep until the end of the week.)

A LITTLE BIT OF TIMELY ADVICE
by McKeel MBride

Time you put on blue
shoes, high-heeled, sequined,
took yourself out dancing.

You been spending too much
time crying salty
dead-fish lakes into soupspoons,

holding look-alike contests
with doom.  Baby, you
need to be moving. Ruin

ruins itself, no use unplanting
what's left of your garden.
Crank up the old radio

into lion-looking-for-food
music; or harmonica, all indigo,
breathing up sunrise.  Down

and out's just another opinion
on up and over.  You say
you got no makings

for a song?  Sing anyway.
Best music's the stuff comes
rising out of nothing.

reprinted from Dog Star Delicatessen, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006.