There is a good reason why your problems seem the biggest after the sun goes down: the allegory is obvious—the darkness represents the unknown, and it’s really the unknown that you fear. Thus, that old saying “knowledge is power” turns out to be true. Unfortunately, so does the saying “hindsight is 20/20.”
Just saw this on my Facebook news feed. All I’m saying is some things you really don’t need to share, okay?
Here is the thing about my relationship with the world: I don’t think my standards are too high.
oh my goodness, this.
Kaiet was of the little people.
In the springtime, if she looked up
her clouds were made of dandelion spores
and she watched them fall
and grow
and fall again
if it were loneliness you were discussing
or being a small, conscious thing
in a vast, unconscious universe,
a rider of butterflies and lawn mower chaser
who communes with beatles and builds worlds with twigs
might at half a dandelion’s height
inform your notions of perspective
When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.
Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness
Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she’d find it comforting.
A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn’t everyone want love?
He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.
Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—
That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there’d be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.
Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn’t imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.
He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone’s Girlhood.
A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you
but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.
I used to be better than real life. Now I got student loans.
This guy shows up at my circ desk with a dongle that comes with Apple computers and explains to me that it won’t help him connect to the conference rooms’ screens because he thinks it’s a DVI connector and the screen has a VGA connection. But he assures me that the thing he has will not work, from comparison, which he points out he learned from Sesamee street.
Then we both sang “one of these things is not like the others, one of these things is wrong. Can you tell which thing is not like the others by the time I finish my song?”
It was pretty great.
