https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/we-are-our-situations-poetry-christopher-gilbert

” I am
into small steps here—­I total the bits of me.
I have lived in countless places, childless,
without song, and now no church of time ahead
behind whose doors one can walk and be
transformed, enormous, again, and facing the sky.

This self becomes a tourist both displaced and situated in his displacement. Selfhood becomes an act of existential improvisation. Selfhood becomes as fluid and difficult as language. These are not difficult poems, but difficulty is often their subject: the difficulty of the gaps between selves, between being and thinking, between timelessness and time. They strive “to build,” as Gilbert writes in the poem “Turning into Dwelling,” “this language house . . . this loving which lives outside time.” The new collection’s title, Turning into Dwelling, underscores the ways the self is simultaneously restless and reflective in Gilbert’s body of work. His poetry makes “turning” both a motion and an act of transformation, and “dwelling” both a shelter and an act of rumination.

I am still, despite countless readings these last years, being introduced to Christopher Gilbert and his selves. He died at the young age of fifty-­seven on July 5, 2007, in Providence, Rhode Island. Graywolf Press published Across the Mutual Landscape, when Michael S. Harper selected it for the 1983 Walt Whitman Award. Harper was one of the first poets I emailed in 2010 to ask about Gilbert. He told me Gilbert had died of an “inherited kidney problem”; that as an undergraduate he’d studied with Robert Hayden at the University of Michigan. Part of me wonders how much Gilbert was shaped by his relationships with Hayden, Harper, and Knight. Gilbert, born in Alabama, was, like Knight, a southern transplant; Gilbert, like Hayden, was raised in industrial Michigan; Gilbert, like Harper, lived much of his adult life in Providence, Rhode Island.”

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/sick

“I cannot go to school today,"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
“I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I’m going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I’ve counted sixteen chicken pox
And there’s one more—that’s seventeen,
And don’t you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut—my eyes are blue—
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I’m sure that my left leg is broke—
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button’s caving in,
My back is wrenched, my ankle’s sprained,
My ‘pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb.
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow’s bent, my spine ain’t straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is—what?
What’s that? What’s that you say?
You say today is. . .Saturday?
G’bye, I’m going out to play!”

Shel Silverstein

Flee amidst the winter snow.
No little frowns in Bethlehem
Harlot’s ribbons for her hair
God didn’t fake the little-seen nipples.
I’ll love as ever deplored.
The snow laid roundabouts free.
Oh, hum all ye faithful.
As tested with day class.
We long to wee ah, oh!
Good pass, my love, you hit my gong
Greensleeves, ah, what a fright/save a bite
On Richmond’s pills, I loved no cost
Try an anti-depressant like loving your femur.
The Ten Commandments were God’s way of dropping a hint.Luckily Moses had a bag for the Tablet.
The Earl I loved was beautiful and so was old Soho.
Queen of the Bray
I loved an ass

Signs and symbols guide the route.
Love gives the soul her appetite.
Though the night is black and starless,
The inner guide is never careless.

The notes are struck, the tune is played,
Plain melodies are overlaid.
In this chant and benediction,
Healing comes for desolation.

Though the passageway is narrow,
This road is the one to follow.
Struggling through the mud and mire,
We see, in darkness, tongues of fire.

The sacred centre of our life
Is never found without some strife.
Just then, the dark and light combine,
To create a symbol for the mind

Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain
Though beautiful dried flowers are shown much grace
Yet lying does not aid us nor does blame

Can we be kind and in kindness contain
The sorrow and oblivion of our place?
Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain

Do we fear to lurch  and be insane:
Lose our minds and live with that disgrace
Lying does not aid us nor does blame

The grapes are crushed and then made into wine
Yet humans tested cry for our embrace.
Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain

Dark our faces grow as if in shame
What has brought us to this awful place
Lying does not aid us nor does blame

Round the room all night I endless pace
Seeking  of the lost a tiny trace
Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain
Will we find the space  to play again?

Now I see the shadows on the wall
And in my heart. I feel the savage loss
Down I come, and with the dust, I fall

Once I scarcely saw the bad at all
And did not think of love and what it cost
Now I see the shadows on the wall

Down amid the weeds I find my call
And  mixed with dark green leaves I am compost
As down I come, and to the dust, I fall

Brilliance cannot last and life appals
In between my cells comes sudden frost
Oh, I feel the cracks within my walls

We  love between the lines with all we feel
Then broken by the cold we join the lost
Down we come, and into  dust, we fall

Must we live and what shall living cost?
Is it ours to judge the present past?
As I watch the shadows on the wall
Down  comes Love and  holds me as I fall

With my foolish love, I once fell for,
After words  seductive and sustained,
A man  who could not trust those he implored

Struck by anguish plain, I then desired
For love  to be rewakened and attained
With a new felt love, I still was for.

Like a worm or beetle on dirt floors
I took to earth to feel the dark again
Forget the man  whose trust was quite impaired

Nervous and uncertain, still unsure
I tried to find the measure of this pain
Caused by loving love   while immature

An agonising ache seeped through my pores
As if  I needed heavy violent rain
To cleanse me from the man who called me whore.

And  now I am appalled and to, ashamed
If we’re touched by love, it leaves its stain
With  ferocious grief , so undermined
I wander in the marshlands of the mind

Maybe death is somewhat like a birth
Forces from elsewhere possess our souls
And in the end, we all must come to earth
No need to work on any other goal

Who decides that one child must be born
Although it has not  grown for 40 weeks
And what a fear when from the womb it’s torn
We don’t remember as we could not speak.

Nature’s wild and lets so many die
As if like sperm, the eggs are well supplied
The well of tears will not like deserts dry
And we’ve lost  the meanings with our guides

As infants in the womb must not fear birth
Acceptance of sad facts brings happiness

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48422/aubade-56d229a6e2f07

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170927-the-words-that-can-make-us-calmer