#betterinthedarkblog

[betterinthedarkreblog]

We name children after the dead in the dim hope that they will resemble them, pretending to blunt the loss of the person we knew while struggling to make the person we don’t know into less of a stranger. It’s compelling, this idea that the new person is so tightly bound to the old, but most of us are afraid to believe it. But what if we are right? Not that the new person is the reincarnation of the old, but rather, more subtly, that they know each other, that the already-were and the not-yets of our world, the mortals and the natals, are bound together somewhere just past where we can see, in a knot of eternal life? In our world, we are free to wonder about this for a lifetime. But the world to come is a busy place.

Dara Horn, The World to Come

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That’s all history is: screams in a cave.

[betterinthedarkblog]

Perchance to Sleep

I’m addicted, you tell me, but this isn’t a trial or court of law, you say. You offer me one prescription in the place of another (try the blue pill instead of the red)

I’ve taken so many pills that I’ve forgotten all their brand names, So speak generically, As if this is the first time anyone has ever told me I’m addicted that if I just come back to see you in two weeks & give you fifty dollars, You’ll be willing to work with me.

I watch Charlie Rose panels on mental illness, and hope the guests around the table are talking about me; because I cannot rely upon tumblr or the lyrics of jack antanoff or the texts of infrequent friends for survival

I cannot rely on thrice weekly sessions where my therapist attempts to provoke his own counter-transference rather than ask me what happened that day

I cannot depend upon my family tree, withering. I must sow the soil with my own seedlings, and wait until spring in the hope they will flower even though I do not know how to work the land

I have been a space cadet for as long as I can remember and you have been Richard Branson’s space elevator attempting to tether me down, without pulling me out of orbit

I cannot depend upon what you’d feed me: a diet of pills & anti-pills uppers & downers steroids & antihistamines stabilizers & antidepressants

I have seen more doctors Worn more diagnoses Swallowed more pills Than I can remember So must write poetry instead of prose

and still and all I cannot find a way to sleep that isn’t habit forming I have become a generic chemical combination of  pills dependent upon other pills alleviating withdrawal symptoms from pills whose names I cannot remember their cumulative effects compounding rather than dissolving

My night is an auto-tuned space-opera unfulfilling and unforgiving full of casual encounters of the queer unkind

You say this isn’t a trial, but why do I feel so guilty as if it had been me  who first handed myself  the tablets instead of love?

—perchance to sleep | @betterinthedarkblog © 2017

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My Theatrical Favorites of 2010

Passion Play

written by Sarah Ruhl directed by Mark Wing Davey presented by Epic Theatre Ensemble

sets by Allen Moyer & Warren Karp costumes by Gabriel Berry & Antonia Ford-Roberts lighting by David Weiner music by David Van Tieghem at the Irondale Center

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It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn

Stanley Kunitz, The Testing Tree

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They went down the avenue of trees, I stood up, looked after them in the moonlight and threw myself on the ground and wept bitterly and jumped up and ran out onto the terrace and saw there down below in the shadow of the high linden trees her white dress shimmering toward the garden gate; I stretched out my arms, and it disappeared.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

[poeticstories]

I’m going to try to see if this submission works. I’ve never used this feature before. Thanks for your consideration.