From their myriad euphemisms, I chose crazy
Why should they put me away?
For I only seek to be free
And I say, why put away what seeks to be free?
Confined to a cage……
Surely cages cause distress
I would wonder to ask the cubicle workers
Corralled in their Cuboidal cubism
Furthering notions of the march forward
Then am I crazy, would I not be part of cubism?
Am I the norm for the minority?
For the milieu seeks sanitized spaces
A linear pointed unfettered line of thought
Geometrical certainties.
While I go to different places of asymmetry
Adopt different pitches and gaits
As I seek the shelter of the library from the mid day sun
I espouse Schopenhauer seated on wasted tub chairs
I am at the back of a bus
My atonal eruptions being
Disdainfully reproached for an assumed nihilism
Or on the dark cavernous sooty damp subway platform
Where I pace hunchbacked, mercilessly trailing my thoughts along subway tiles
Aligning them to the confines of civilized cubism
When I walked into a library somewhere around 29th Street East Manhattan and found people with mental illness lounging in the cool confines of the library, the only way to escape hot humid August outdoors. This poem speaks for people I have observed with mental illness, quite alone, in various parts of the city, on mass transit, at public places, in libraries and even on pedestrian paths. There is a palpable sense of loneliness and fear, of feeling misunderstood perhaps.