Depression As Deep As The Ocean In Sleep
I Can’t feel the knives or the needles—
that absence itself is a symptom,
the nervous system dimming its lamps
to conserve what little current remains.
I make a grandness in the dark—
the mind, starved of warmth, builds cathedrals
out of shadow, rehearses importance
as a way to survive being small and alone.
Depression is not sadness.
It is anesthesia mistaken for peace.
It is the brain lowering the volume
on pain until it lowers the volume on joy.
I see it in the pauses between sentences,
in the way time thickens,
in how tomorrow stops applying for citizenship
in the patient’s imagination.
This illness speaks in negatives:
not hungry, not tired, not hopeful,
until the self becomes a series of doors
the body no longer bothers to open.
Yet even here, there is data worth trusting:
the fact that you came,
the fact that language still gathers itself
into lines, into images, into a reaching.
Treatment begins quietly—
with restoring sensation, not happiness;
with learning again how pain can be felt
without becoming a verdict.
One day the needles return as needles,
the knives as metaphors only,
and the dark—still present—
loses its authority to name you.
Until then,
this is not weakness.
This is an injured mind
doing its best to keep me alive.
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