The Line and Form of Black Bile

Depression is not
a black dog. It’s more like
a tuning-in
to (what seems like)
the awful truth:
that there is nothing new
under the sun. Really.
It’s a trembling
within constraints of rule and line,
an energy of recognition
with nowhere to go,
a homecoming to the disordered
order of the world.

It’s an openness
to not deceiving yourself—
your hollow self,
your empirical skin and bones
and dust and fluids.
It’s the tenderness
beyond tenderness,
tucking yourself in.

I can’t speak to it
because it’s moth-like
to its flame of (something like)
restfulness, a center-point
with a hole in it
where there’s no rest to be found.
Because that’s how I live my life:
transposing human bulk
from place to place,
rousing myself from the
inertial point
a hundred minor times per day
and at a couple of
key junctures of decision.

And each new day
comes with its own inertias,
and they’re all
superficially different,
but I know
that the heavenly bodies
move in their preordained patterns
every day and night,
and only the violence of a supernova
ever breaks the already-laid-out
boredom in the night sky.

Consider: "the universal acid of geological time."