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.