Children of the Glen

So, I just found out that if you set Facebook to update along with your blog, it mass-posts everything you've ever written on it. Oops. Guess its a good thing that this is still fairly new. Still, in that spirit of deluging my friend's news feeds, here's one more poem I wrote this afternoon. Its fairly self-explanatory. As always, feedback appreciated =D


Children of The Glen

i am spending my summer teaching children
to make change, in loco parentis, in place of
their parents, who wouldn't be their parents,
couldn't deal with their disabilities, so
they shuffled off their sons and their daughters,
granddaughters and grandsons, to a center
that claimed it could care for them unconditionally.
I've been working there for three weeks now, and
so far on the staff, there is only one woman and one man
who look at faces more than afflictions, and they are no
longer clinicians, but they still speak to the children directly,
in dialogue, not diagnoses, not the ABCs of Psychiatry,
that ugly alphabet of acronyms where
A is for Autism, and
B is for Bipolar,
C is for Conduct Disorder
D is for Dandy-Walker
E is for Echolalia and
F is for Fucked: Fucked if I know, Fucked if I care,
Not Otherwise Specified, See you next week.
These scribbled sheets of IEPs before me are
the decisions of doctors whose paychecks
depend on their ability to find answers that
fit neatly between the 4 axes of impairment.

i am spending my summer teaching children
who are not children, who will never have
been children. many are my age, but they
have been bounced between group home
and foster home, to the jailhouse and back again,
filling files and folders with their paper trail personalities.
I open them carefully, only to find that Philip's
last 7 years have been lost, and no one questions this.
Eric's engineer father underestimates his intelligence
by four grade levels: he doesn't belong here, but
he is polite to me, he counts himself lucky for
getting to go home on the weekends. And he is,
if only in comparison to Constance,
her grandmother is glad that she's gone, her
social worker says there will be no further contact.
A is for Abandoned and
B is for Betrayed
C is for Criminalized
D is for Drugged
E is for Emptied and
F is for the failing of the system, whose
death i document in this litany of indecencies
that I am keeping behind closed doors, because my closed fists
can do no damage to a doctor's orders.
i cannot save their souls from the pharmacies or
the licensed care specialists who couldn't care less.
I can only listen, when no one else does
I can only speak, where no one else will
i can only spend my summer teaching children
to make change.