I wrote this poem on April 3, 2015. I was in a dark place. I was close to suicide for the first time since 2010. I had been mourning my grandfather and my life was in a bad place. I was in the depression cycle that started in the summer of 2014 and didn’t end until the summer of 2015. I haven’t had a depression cycle quite as long as this cycle.

This poem is one of my more darker free thought poems. I just wrote what I was feeling.

This poem came weeks before I started therapy.

My Darkest Depression

I know it has been a long while…
I have been lost.
Depressed.
And even tittering on the edges of suicidal thoughts.

It has really just been that way.
I am so afraid.
So afraid of what could happen.
What might happen?
The truth?
I am going down a…

Maurice Cunningham is a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts who has become an expert on the subject of Dark Money. He has his own name for the billionaires devoted to charter schools. He calls them the “Financial Privatization Cabal.” That’s clever and accurate but I stick with “corporate reformers” because there are fewer syllables.*

Cunningham (no relation to the charter-loving Peter of the same last name) has done a deep dive into the Dark Money funders of the 2016 campaign to expand charter schools in Massachusetts via a referendum called Question 2. A New York City organization called Families for Excellent Schools (FES) arrived on the scene to bundle and dispense Dark Money and renamed itself Great Schools Massachusetts. (FES was funded by the Waltons and has now been replaced by a new group which calls itself Massachusetts Parents United, also Walton funded.)

What is Dark Money?…