You can only spend so many hours in labs, study groups and classrooms - under relentless, fluorescent lighting - before you start feeling life withdrawal.

When I hit that stresshold, I need to rebalance myself.

I could go to the New Haven harbor - I find the ocean endlessly relaxing - or for a quick fix, I can always rely on the warmth of multicolored product packaging.

For the last one, a grocery store will do. I’ll walk the bright, prismatic cereal aisle, and run my finger gently along the gratuitous, rainbowed variety of selections.

It’s a soothing gesture that I repeat several times. A reminder that there are still beautiful, shiny things out there, on demand, in the uncomplicated, non-academic world.

Today my son
Is to be sentenced
To prison. He
Lives 23 hours a day
In a jail cell, he will move on
Steeling courage few of us
Ever have to experience.
Consider your luck.
His mental illness
never to be a crime.
Will there be light for a prism?
Where he can turn to
Other pathways
Less dark and Forge
Himself into the open
Blue sky and all the rainbows
From here on out.
On the outside we are blind
On the inside some
Are given true sight.
I cry for a rotten system
In mental health care
We own. You might
Want to pull up some buckets
For all mothers tears
Knowing the best we have
Is incarceration. How is that
America? Tired of blaming anyone but yourself?

After a storm comes a rainbow they say
But the storm ripped the roof off my house
The storm drowned my entire family
The storm left me with nothing
So now
The rainbow doesn't mean that much

So beautiful
now can't touch
no more.

Maybe just maybe
after the clouds
spread their black throw
up to the horizon.

And the deep singing sea
beneath it showers down
upon the beautiful rose.

The scene is all a bright show
yet mystified even more.
The finishing line is drawn
in a ring of rainbow.

Here I go again
A vicious circle in my brain
A rainbow road, a rainbow rock
I just live to check a box
But at least your color i can see
When it’s just rainbow rock and me