Invisible Sickness

I met him at the mental hospital,
Orange hair and a beautiful face
Long stripped of the calm expression
Once worn as a bulletproof mask
That promised to shield him
From this world we call sanity,
Grayscale clothing draped
Across a linear frame designed
For the image
Of mathematical perfection.
You are worthless
He told himself constantly,
Drowning in morbid silence,
Brilliant mind and agonized soul
He hid
To be perceived as a part of civilization,
To be seen as human,
Pretending to walk in the light
For so long
Disbelieved,
Pain is never relieved
If it cannot be seen
But when visible,
Disturbs those
Whose lives matter more,
This is real.
Out of sight, out of mind
And thinly separated from
The crisp morning air
With suffocation imminent,
Six feet under and still breathing
He hadn’t looked
The mortician in the eyes
As the dust blinded him,
Blocking the light
Came a million scarring thoughts,
Lacerations
That went so much deeper
Than one could dare expect,
Those words,
You are worthless,
Believed and piercing him
All the way through,
All the way through
The body to the center of the mind,
Buried alive by long grey sleeves
Because we all know
Sickness
Makes healthy people uncomfortable.
There will be no voice for him,
For monsters,
For the unseen camouflage survivors
Who are not supposed to exist,
There will be no voice
For the oppressed and the hidden;
And there will be no voice
If it is not our own,
If we do not use our last breaths
To scream in a language
They will understand,
As we are buried alive.
He whispered to me,
Of all of this,
Drown out the symptoms,
Cover the pain,
This is real.
And with every ounce of my effort,
I listened:
Lives, lives, multiple lives,
A single consciousness
That was far too precious
To ever be obliterated,
Noting that he who took calculus
As a high school freshman,
A well-educated prodigy
And future physicist
Who cut through his own skin,
Saying
You are worthless,
Even with circuitry and string theory
He still could not have used
Those same synapses
Extraordinary levels of analysis
To cure himself
In the pursuit of happiness,
He told others
Their lives were worth living,
But could not say the same
For himself.
To the crystalline chandelier
Of his blazing magnificent intellect,
With exponentially more than enough energy
To illuminate the universe or tear it apart,
You, connecter of worlds,
Keeper of possibilities,
You hang by a thin, fraying thread
Made of hope,
To recover
To be heard.
And the gravedigger felt your heartbeat
Your voice,
Your powerful, endless light,
This is what he tried to drown in the dirt,
Not truly because he believed
You are worthless,
But because he could not
Bear your suffering,
Sickness
Makes healthy people uncomfortable,
And I look up
Into the eyes of a genius
Who no longer values his life,
A sealed synaptic coffin
Reading
You are worthless,
Over and over and over again,
You are priceless.
You are priceless,
You,
Ring the bell to let them know
You have lived through this,
Know you are priceless,
Scream and scream in your own language
Of everlasting strength
Until they listen,
We will speak of health and sickness,
We will speak of life and death
Openly, because
This is real.
I look up into his eyes
You are priceless
I say this with sincerity
Equal to that with which
You have abused yourself
You are priceless
I will say this forever
Until you believe me:
You are priceless,
You are priceless,
You
Are
Priceless.