“Some Lessons in Poverty”
Doug Van Gundy

Keep yourself and your family clean.
When you are invited to dinner, accept.

A glass of warm
water 20 minutes before a meal
makes a bruised orange or a heel of bread
feel like more.

When you run out of cream, learn to
drink coffee black. When you run out of sugar,
learn to drink it bitter. When you run out of coffee,
learn to drink it not at all.

Buy dried beans and soak them
overnight, you’ll get half-again as many beans
for the money.

Quit
smoking, even if it’s your only
comfort. A pack a day is twenty-eight dollars a week and
fourteen-hundreed-and-fifty-six dollars a year.

Selling blood doesn’t carry
the stigma that it used to.

From: Doug Van Gundy. “Unsolicited Advice.” A Life Above Water: Poems. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2007. page 59.