POEM: What Durkheim Dreams About

“What Durkheim Dreams About” is a poem I wrote while taking a sociology class and having to read excerpts from Durkheim’s Suicide. I disliked his approach to life and wrote this poem inspired by that, as sort of a subversion and way to try to empathize with what he was saying. In it, I am arguing that emptiness and the idea of too much space and freedom is ultimately what causes suffering. I use a few metaphors about space and the ocean to convey this, that there is a horror in vastness and extensive space.

What Durkheim Dreams About
by Ruby Davis

I want my dreams to turn into the day,
to repeat like a wave curling in on itself
and breathing in nothing but the sand.

I want a whale’s belly
more than I want an ocean
Anything unexplored promises
deviation, an unknown. I’d sleep smothered
by a stomach lining before I’d ever
touch the sea’s surface.

See, I want tides, not trenches.
I want orbit, not ooze.
I want gravity cradling me.
I want a cosmic waltz in a step that exists only to
threaten interpretation and constant expansion.

I crave a fenced in yard–
chunks of land carved in a pile of dirt hinged
on a vacuum just to say look, there is something in this nothing
You can be something in this nothing.

Look, this emptiness is an illusion.
This you and me and the space between us is an illusion.
Tell me who you are and I’ll rephrase it to tell
you who I am. We can only fill these voids with repetition.
Every word like a churning gear in an invisible machine and,
oh God, I want the mechanical, never the organic.
And who hasn’t prayed for a ritual, not for the god behind it,
but for the candle wax melted and finally connected with the palms,
something proven tangible? I want that.
Everyone knows it’s easier to fall
in love with instruction manuals than it is
to fall in love with fairy tales.

I’m ready to devote myself to a whole.
This place has gotten too big. I vow to never leave my room.
I vow to only ever sleep under a ceiling of glow in the dark stars,
just because their pattern won’t change.
I want the dreaming to be an organ instead of a symptom.
I swear a glass ceiling reveals too much–
– I want something that doesn’t risk shatter.

I want to tell you about how it isn’t the
the bullet or the gun or the hand that kills you,
but the shatter; the cleared out tunnel through the skull.
How it isn’t the rope or even the chair that kills you.
It’s the emptiness created when you kick it.

I want to tell you but I don’t want to seem morbid because

You want me to reach my hands into the sky
and let it pour out through my fingers
You want me to gape in the emptiness
You want me to expand,
but I am not done tightening.