If you aren't looking
you will never see them
hidden in whitewashed caste systems
forced to conform
to federal papers
which fit in a folder
that fits in a file
of an emaciated white guy
who doesn't fit anywhere
checking the boxes and "disorders"
voted on by
a majority of uncaught criminals
who are protecting store front lifestyles
while the real merchandise of their lives
lays in the back storage room
with the rats of their conscience.
They judge sanity
setting rigid walls
and hanging permanent badges on
Salvador Dali dream catchers,
borderless thinkers,
and geniuses
of the things not yet discovered.
Just because the gifted can not
or will not
stop thinking,
they are detained for their
Difference.

State Hospital No. 3
titles every page
framed in frayed edges
and unfrayed passion.
Lions of courage stand
with childlike joy
in traveling circuses
obliterating demons of oppression,
overwhelming reoccurring ECT...ECT...ECT.
An etcetera of living
beyond electroconvulsive therapy
where the spelling of ECTLECTRC is perfect
in its grammar and definition,
standing in banners atop
the wide-eyed portraited guardians
of institutionalism.

Glorious art shuddered on a curb,
lost and intended for *******...

Thank God, beauty beholders come
in all ages of eyes.
14 year olds also find treasure
in garbage piles
clutching dearly to the feeling
that greatness lies in colored pencils
dancing on unusual stationary.
Edward Deeds
comes of age
in the same moment
as the scavenging boy does
opening the binders
on their inter-joined journey
36 annuals after dislodging it
from a leftover ham and rye.

A voice is unmuted
merely by being seen.
Revelation is given
by turning on the light.
Art, music and knowledge is infinite
when boxes are destroyed,
ignorance rebuked,
and courage is embraced.

Let us dare to never be
just what we know.
Let us live to be
what we have never yet seen.

Im sick

I have been
for a long time
My stomach
Has never felt right

My mind
has never settled
My nerves
Always jumbled

In sore heaps
My bones lie dry
Beneath a tarp
Of scarred skin

Maybe sick is
the wrong word

Im wrong

Everything about me
Falls into the wrong place
Nothing matches up
On my disorganized face

Im physically uncomfortable
In my own skin
I want to rip it off
And regrow it again

Maybe the problem
Is in who ive made myself
Maybe i dislike
What ive portraited to everyone else

So maybe i should try
And take apart my mind
And regrow my very being
From my center. From inside.

before your hazy gossamer
        touches an instant
an epoch, reaching—
shudder once
then twice
then proceed
until your eyes grow quiet
and sink into the creases of your skin
charting maps all the while
the kind i will learn to
        memorize
so that i may
find you in my blindness
[cypher you
pocket you
rattle you closely]
when your kaleidoscope bleeds
into a portraited collage
the stories you kept on your face
        all these years

                          and i wept

Let thy be to the marriage with maiden
Made thy life not seek of any other
Living a contrast of sweetness and pain
Thus be a mother with sons and daughters.
Constrict verdicts of every known evil
Construe what is bright inside with thyself
Let not both severed nor darkness prevail
Souls utterly preserved within the shelf.
Constrained thy fire walled our time not to flame
Have no bashful faces distorts to frown
This mesmerizing life portraited frame
Someday I and thee will be out of town.
Let thy love be demised to the marriage
Thus faith be lived until our dying days.