Dark Matter

1.
Inside the pebble in my shoe
might be a universe.

2.
We don’t know
how much space a universe takes up.
Might be many civilizations in there,
colluding, working my foot into agony.

3.
Maybe they think
they are appeasing God,
and maybe they are.

4.
In the pebble universe
they serenely do not know
the nature of reality.

5.
In this universe we also know 
little of the nature of reality —
the difference being
that we know this and are rendered
far less than serene by the knowledge.

6.
Wait a second, you say —
if they know a universe and
are part of ours, why are we describing them
as separate from one another?
Isn’t this a case of scale
or compartmentalization?  All one
universe, broken into parts?

7.
Wait a second, I say.
Boundaries, walls, hard edges.
I’m in pain.  There must be
another universe. Our own
would never hurt me.

8.
In the pebble universe
they say
the same things we say here
only smaller.

9.
Turning on the news
again in this universe and
watching the news of this universe,
or the news from inside the pebble
that irritates me so, or maybe
it’s the news of the one universe
that holds us all.  I’m in 
as much pain as all of them can hold
and unable to stumble away from it.

If I say
I am depressed
someone always asks “Why?”

and sometimes
there is a “why” as simple
as saying there was a soap bubble,

a rainbow ball
that disappeared before
I could touch it, perhaps, 

or the thought
of an unrepaired mistake 
from fifty years back.

Sometimes the “why”
is a burned bridge or
a puff of smoke

from a ruined hope.
Sometimes, the “why”
comes surging up

from chromosomal
oceans, a wave of regret
for how I was conceived,

how I evolved, who my
ancestors were. All those
possibilities, yet now and then 

there is no “why” at all.
Now and then when 
I say I am depressed

it’s like saying I’m cold
in August, or lost
in my own bedroom.

I don’t know who
I become when it happens
that there is no “why.” 

Is that me on the floor,
me in the corner, me
with my hand buried

in broken glass? Why?
If there is no “why”
there may not be

an “I’ either. I don’t know
how it happens; there are times
when depression is an icy lake

I sink into and disappear,
asking “why” as you are asking,
getting the same stark answers:

cold, dark; unreasoning descent;
eventual surrender.
Which is to say, sometimes 

there’s no answer at all. All I can do then
is stroke for the surface and hope
for a fire on the shore

if and when I break through.
Something to light my way home and then
warm me back to life.

A fire like you, perhaps.
A fire in the shape
and sound of you.

Whenever he thought
he was on the brink of understanding himself
better than before, he would have 
the same vision of being buried deep,
carried by unknown people into a cave
in a procession lit
by a single white torch.  
They’d place him at the back of the cave, 
alone with the torch, laid out on the stone floor
in the dim light until the flame died,
at which point he’d get up and stare 
at the prehistoric walls
and see upon them fantastic pictures
of dancing beings of light and air
trapped incongruously below.
Then he’d shake himself
loose from the vision and come up 
to ground level and try and try 
to bring those beings with him,
or at least to tell their stories,

and he would fail
and fail again
but each time, he’d look forward
to returning to the cave
to try and fail 
and fail again.

I don’t mind your drug full eyes
any more than I mind how cloudy
the steel of my own brain becomes
under the threat of smoke. I am 
no hypocrite. I prize the undue mix
of clarity and deep confusion one needs
to get by in this climate of insult and 
anger. You have to get ripped up like
a wrecked paper crane, unfold your awareness
in pieces on a desk, try to reassemble it;
if you need a chemical to make the glue stick,
use it.  You need an herb or a pill, burn it
or swallow it.  A clear head can mean different things
to sane people now and then, and now
it might mean survival to let it go. I do not mind
your sweet muddle, your gentle fog,
for the same reason I do not mind my own. 
I cannot embrace the world today
without acknowledging how illogical
one must be to do so.