...held them in my hands to search for reason but found no means of death for three black and menacing birds yet these are the birds i saw when i first lifted my eyes upon the heavens and these remain those three birds whom i'll continue to watch in flight and pray to the infinite blackness of unknowing that death will grant me the grace to be one of these three birds.  

Opal Marie Petty was 16 yrs old in 1934 when she began to see a dark lurking man laughing at her and winding scrub weed around his neck outside of her window. Her God fearing parents were persuaded by the Doctor to have her institutionalized when she began digging her own grave in the Texas dirt with a butcher knife. She was packed up with a simple red dotted dress and sent into the mental hospitals which during the Depression Era meant that conditions were grim, meager, desperate- patients slept on concrete floors and tended each others needs since the staff were cruel and far between. Opal's custodial care in treatment of her mental illness consisted of 35 years of work in the hospital laundry where she earned $2 a week. Eventually 51 years passed and Opal's sister took to concern and fought the state of Texas for release. In the passing of time that was to follow, Opal recovered as well as could and took an interest in making clothes for the 6 dolls she bought with the earnings form the hospital laundry and treated them as her babies she never had due to forced sterilization. She began to play the piano and took delight in choosing colors with which to paint her fingernails and then she died on a fine spring day in the month of march in the year of someones Lord, 2005.  

i'm leaving home and fretting over where to pack the collection of oddly shaped spoons fashioned from many metals by gypsies who cut off fingers when the ring would not slide off.

they gave us small pieces of wood for writing down fears, gratitudes, confessions and forgiveness which grew anonymous in the sheer mass of all these fervent hopes but when the temple went up in flames, the smoke billowed out over the desert and everyone mentioned began to dream in color. 

the only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. Marcel Proust 

this is certain- these things i lay at your feet. not heavy things, for perfection weighs more..no, they will be objects to rest in your palm- of substance, none. things of me are shaped in air. vapor. sleep. giants. materials made yet never said. acidic. i am chemical. count on me to collapse, be sporadic, sullen, wet. i evaporate nice, clean and effortlessly the moment you tire of me. and if you grow weak, it's ok for nothing i did or will give you could ever be that heavy.