…they always seemed backwards to me, all the stuff about “falling into a depression”, as if gravity would always pull you down into the dumps. So I wrote these, instead. (Don’t remember when, they’re in a giant file of my poems.) Because it seems to me the opposite, depression involves pulling yourself away from reality, against gravity.
Rising Into Sadness
When the world is a graveyard
Of dusty skeletons falling apart
And the sky cannot be seen
And even the pines are no longer green
I know that there have been
Too many words
Tossed for moments into living color sky
Ever falling back to a cushion of drabness
This is the way of the world, we said
Watching our eyes adjust to the dimness
Gravity works funny ways, said the world
For those who trust in words
Laughing to itself
As the ashen floor crumbled
Knocking the wind out of us
Smelling the soil as sky blinded our eyes
We had landed on solid green
Ballastexistenz 