1. Love early. Love often. Love without restraint. Gather the pieces of your shattered heart. Mend it, so it can be shattered again.
2. Never bottle up your tears. Let them flow. They are good for the soil, and you'll be lighter without them.
3. Money isn't real, and signifies nothing of true value. Chasing it is not worth the cost. Instead, pursue beauty—both your own, and that which you find in others.
4. Spend more time in nature. Walk there naked. Scry the future in leaves you wet. Trust the animals you meet.
5. Run. Run every day. Run while it still feels like flying.
6. Learn to love the silence. Learn to love it more when it is shared. Learn to love it the most when it is unexpected.
7. Give freely. Give anonymously. Delight in the joy you bring to strangers, as much as that you bring to the people you love.
8. Tread lightly on the earth. Nurture more than you consume. Heal more than you wound.
9. Water is a miracle. Let it carry you. Close your eyes every day to feel, just for a moment, the endless ocean rushing in your body.
10. Whenever possible, disappear. Tell no one where you are going, including yourself. Float down a city street, or a desert gully, like a wisp of smoke from a long dead fire.
11. Take joy in love that is not your own. Delight in love you only witness from afar.
12. Hold your own love lightly, like a fragile thing. Learn that it grows stronger when left in the sunlight for others to find.
13. Accept that hotel rooms are the temples of the modern age. Worship your body there, in front of a muted TV. Use every towel they provide.
14. Don't be afraid to be ridiculous. The gods want you to be ridiculous, or they would not have made you wobble upright on two legs.
15. Soon after you learn to love, love someone twice your age.
16. Before you forget how to love, love someone half your age.
17. When someone breaks your heart, take a moment to mend it, then offer it to someone new.
18. Life is full of dark and dangerous holes, yawning chasms full of danger, and hidden cliffs that will threaten to swallow you whole. Stare into every one. Descend into a few from time to time.
19. Before you're 20, you won't have any idea who you are. After 20, you'll be sure you know, and you'll be wrong.
20. Make lists for yourself. Stack them conveniently near the matches, by the fireplace.
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Selections From: The White Porcelain Well
PoetryPoems, East Village, New York City. The White Porcelain Well evokes both the inner and outer landscapes of New York City's gay village. Written mostly in coffee houses and all-night diners over the course of several years, these poems attempt to ca...
