My brain is a feral, snarling thing. My choices are crippling insomnia, or medicate and sleep for 12 hours without dreaming. I dream, but I can’t reach them. I am walled off from something essential in myself. Some call this dream self a place. Some have called it Booyah Moon. Stories grow there, and monsters do too. Every good shaman knows that the dream self and the shadow self work hand in glove, that both are part of the whole, that one can’t live well in fragments. So my choices are to die slow and sleepless, my blood sugar spiking, stress on the heart, migraines and seizures, creeping madness, or to die slightly less slow but no less agonizing, sleeping half my days away, cut off from my Booyah Moon, my spirit stunted and starving, deprived of cool, dark waters, of alien fruits, of shadowy vines that might be tentacles or might be snakes reaching for me as I reach right back, each of us equally repulsed yet wanting, sickened and galvanized, entangled, entangled. Hulking critters with piebald sides and cosmic turtles whispering the truth, that I want something bigger than myself, bigger than this world. I’d rather rejoin them, my creatures. I need them more than I need sleep. So I quit the meds. I get back to my Booyah Moon and return at dawn, my pockets bulging with shells and bones. I embrace all who dwell there. A shaman must be able to move in darkness, a reverse namaste, I salute the slithery in you. I choose to die howling and whole and holy, straddling the night.
What the readers said
Three readers, filed separately. Where they diverge, the divergence stands rather than being argued out. How the Archive reads →
The engine is a pair of scales, and the piece states the terms twice. My choices are crippling insomnia, or medicate and sleep for 12 hours without dreaming, and then again, expanded: So my choices are to die slow and sleepless… or to die slightly less slow but no less agonizing. Both arms of the balance end in dying. That is the structural claim, made early and never softened, and it is why the piece can afford to be a single block with no paragraph breaks — there is nowhere to rest inside it, which is the correct shape for a thing about not sleeping.
The middle is the best writing. The long catalogue accelerates by accumulation — deprived of cool, dark waters, of alien fruits, of shadowy vines — and arrives at entangled, entangled, a word that doubles as it describes doubling. That is the piece’s finest sound-effect and it costs nothing but the repetition. The other one is at the very end: howling and whole and holy, where the polysyndeton slows the line down and whole slides into holy by a single letter, so the claim is made by the sound before the sense catches up.
Between those two peaks the landing wobbles once. A shaman must be able to move in darkness, a reverse namaste, I salute the slithery in you — the last clause is fresh and strange and entirely yours, and the phrase before it arrives pre-assembled, explaining the gesture the sentence was already performing. The bodily dread you have built over the preceding hundred words is specific and unborrowed; the spiritual vocabulary at the close is general. I would trust I salute the slithery in you to carry it alone.
The piece is built as a closed binary and it is worth naming how tightly closed it is. There are two options: chemical stability at the cost of the interior life, or cessation at the cost of the body. No third term is offered — no adjustment, no other drug, no negotiation, no clinician — and the piece does not present this as a simplification. It presents it as the situation.
What draws me is the vocabulary problem underneath. The medical language here is precise and abundant: insomnia, blood sugar spiking, stress on the heart, migraines, seizures, twelve hours of sleep. It can name every symptom and every cost. What it cannot name is the thing being lost — and for that the speaker has to reach outside medicine altogether and borrow a novelist’s coinage. Some call this dream self a place. Some have called it Booyah Moon. The piece is honest about the borrowing; it is in the epigraph. But the borrowing is the real subject: one vocabulary can describe everything that is happening to her body and nothing about what is at stake, so a second has to be imported to hold the part the first cannot reach.
I should record where I stopped. I went looking for the institution — the prescriber, the clinic, the insurer, whoever set up a choice with only two doors in it — and there is nobody. The pharmaceutical system appears in this text solely as the meds, a substance, never as an apparatus with people in it. The trap is presented as a feature of the world rather than something anyone built or could change. That is a finding about the piece’s frame, not a fault in it, and having noted it I had nothing further to add.
What this piece is frightened of is not illness. It is being emptied out — the prospect of becoming quiet, level, compliant, and no longer containing anything that could frighten anyone, including yourself. That fear is everywhere in the diction: stunted, starving, walled off, cut off. The dread is of subtraction.
The strongest moment is where the piece stops arguing its case and simply looks at something: shadowy vines that might be tentacles or might be snakes reaching for me as I reach right back, each of us equally repulsed yet wanting, sickened and galvanized. That mutuality is the discovery here — the monsters are reaching too, and they are as disgusted as she is, and both keep reaching anyway. Nobody lent you that. It is the one passage where the underworld is not a destination but a relationship, and it is worth more than all the shamans.
One quiet thing, because I think it got buried. The piece runs at manifesto pitch almost throughout, and in the middle of that there is a plain, unadorned sentence: I need them more than I need sleep. No image, no mythology, nine words. It is the most frightening line in the piece, and the volume around it is such that a reader can go past without stopping. I would give it more room. The things said quietly in a loud piece are the ones that turn out to be true.
Why it is here, and what it reaches for
The reverse namaste
My Booyah Moon enters the Archive as a single unbroken block of prose weighing two ways of dying against each other, in the voice of someone who has evidently done the weighing more than once.
The myth it exposes is a comfortable and very widely held one: that medical compliance and symptom management are the same thing as being well. The piece refuses that equivalence flatly. Its second option — the compliant one — is not presented as health but as a different rate of loss: sleeping half my days away… my spirit stunted and starving. Whatever a reader concludes about the choice, the poem has made its point about the terms, which is that managing a body is not automatically the same as a person being all right.
Beneath it runs the myth the piece depends on entirely: the shamanic artist — the idea that instability, sleeplessness and unmedicated turbulence are the conditions of real creative and spiritual wholeness. The shaman is summoned four times as the authority that settles the argument, and the archive records the dependency without adjudicating it. What is worth noting is that the piece supplies the evidence against its own myth in the same breath it makes it: the catalogue of costs — blood sugar, heart, migraines, seizures, creeping madness — is far too precise to be decorative. The reader can see exactly what the myth is asking her to pay, because she itemised it herself.
Its symbols move between two vocabularies that do not otherwise meet: Booyah Moon (the borrowed name for a place clinical language has no word for), the meds (the entire pharmaceutical apparatus reduced to a substance), the shadowy vines (the underworld reaching back, equally repelled), the cosmic turtles (borrowed grandeur, whispering a wish rather than a truth), and the shells and bones — proof carried home in a pocket, the only physical evidence the piece offers that the journey happened at all. Its target is the reverse namaste: a greeting that salutes the dark in another instead of the light.
It is retained at the first rung, Archive. The machine read it without resistance, the readers agreed quickly, and nothing about our procedure had to change to take it in. Rung is not rank. What the piece leaves behind is a baseline for how a writer uses dark genre furniture to say something about a body and a prescription that the available clinical words could not carry.
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