Fist Draft- No title

[notoriousbrb]

Will I still be able to handle
the New York Times
Crossword
(beyond Tuesday)??????-
is all I can think
as I sit on my porch
and smoke too many cigarettes
on the day
that I decide
ECT is for me (oh yeah).
Because right
now
I can’t do a crossword
without each
five letter
word looking like
D E A T H
across or down,

and I am mostly
down, so much easier than across.

And I hope that
these little shocks
won’t trouble me so much
that a seven letter word for melancholy
S A D N E S S
does not elude me,
even if
Even if
I never feel like lying in a ditch
for one more day in my life.

I want words
to mean more than just a state of chemical
emotion
to me. And the
Crossword,
no matter what my temples endure,
the
Crossword
needs to come easy to me,
and if it will not, then there is the deciding factor.

So, I look for a four letter word
for “have faith”
and I
do the dishes
feed the baby
cry myself into a nap
before I have found that the answer
is
H O P E.