Tips For Your Quarter-Life Crisis

Don’t feed your kale salad to the wolf puppies.
Don’t let the rain fall another inch.
Don’t look for pictures of yourself in the bottom drawer.
Don’t swim amok among the sea urchins.
Don’t show your ankle to the guy who runs the taco truck,
or do. Whatever.

Swipe right and then throw
your phone into oncoming traffic.
Do your hips swing low?
If they don’t, you might find you like it
when they do.

You’re a sweet chariot of shoulds
flying too close to Saturn’s 62 moons.
It’s hard to dodge them all.

Be gentle with yourself.
Be   so   fucking     gentle   you can’t even feel yourself.
Make like a Great Basin bristlecone pine and grow for millennia.
Share a tangerine with a stranger, why don’t you!

Go to the cat café and free all of the felines,
listen to the caress of their purrs
in the damp, pockmarked streets.

Contemplate what self-care really means
and chop wood all night until the dawn
reveals your shining new callouses.

Excuse yourself while you kiss the giant sequoia tree.
Rent that apartment with shag carpet, and live there.
Sing your own kind of siren song.

Go back to your childhood home
and throw jellyfish at it. Wear gloves.