currently love*

                                 [...] All this was therapy,
                     I figured, since grad school was stressful enough
           to send three people I knew to the clinic

                     with barbiturate overdoses (two made it,
           one didn’t), and I’m not even listing here
all the divorces I know of that were directly
                     attributable to that constant pressure
to be the best, be publishable, hireable,
           lovable, that came from professors and sweethearts
and parents but mainly from ourselves,
                     as though each of us were two people,
a good and capable slave, on the one hand,
           and, on the other, a psychotic master

who either locked us up with our pots
                     of boiling water or sent us out to dance
with the devil in the streets of Baltimore. [...]

--David Kirby, "Dear Derrida"



*once again, I mean, since this was pretty much on repeat during those 2007 months