The history of our relationship with mental illness is the history of silence. Everything Has Become Birds is an attempt to change that. For centuries the mentally ill have either been locked up, driven out of cities and towns by whip and lash, sterilized, lobotomized, and euthanized. The catalogue of horrors rivals the worst of humanities abuses and yet comparatively little has been written about it. How often the victims were silenced, told their pain wasn't real, their illness wasn't an illness at all but demonic possession, the result of "unnatural" urges, or a fault in their character. And yet, the history of mental illness is rich with geniuses who were not allowed to talk about their illness or feared to. Scientists and artists like Sir Isaac Newton, Beethoven, Leonardo Davinci or Vincent Van Gogh. Writers and philosophers such as Frederich Nietszche, Virignia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Edgar Allan Poe. The poems in this book grew out of an attempt to give voice back to those who have suffered from mental illness, to allow them to speak about their experience in their own words then use the poems to create a dialogue that opens the reader to our shared humanity and the fact that, as the  Cheshire Cat reminds us, "we're all mad here."

I. Antiquity

Black Angel 6

There is no shepherd but silence 7

Against the broken stone 9

The biggest problems come from being 10

The road out is like the road in 11

Somewhere hidden 12

II. The Middle Ages

A candle lit in the hollow of a wall 14

What certain voice 15

This is how you become absent 16

A dark and private weather 17

That winged and sacred thing 18

The crowd in the mind 19

That we might come back whole 20

Aglow, in silence 21

This creature 22

As if the night had not begun 23

III. The Renaissance

Flies in summer 25

This imagined world 26

In waning light 27

In every heart, a mouth 29

Absence 30

These distracted things 31

This small knowing 32

The sting of the finite 33

A different kind of dark 34

Waking 35

IV. The Enlightenment

After the leaves fall, the black birds lift one by one 37

Too much world to hold 38

The dredging 39

[I'm convinced I'm never awake] 40

The cut of feathers 41

Song of water and earth 42

Whose body is not torn 44

To sing and begin again 45

This void 46

Into isn't 47

All that we remember is wind 48

V. The Nineteenth Century

Stealing fire 50

With its mouth full 51

Tomb of words 53

The flower's throat 54

Now daybreak comes 55

Backwards into being 56

Crossing over 57

Through the keyhole 58

Everything has a price 59

This hungry map 60

That old story 61

VI. The Modern Era

When the night sky blooms 64

Attention Woolworth Shoppers 65

All that remains 66

There are all sorts of violence 67

[And so I wake] 68

Room of windows 69

The wind is an ocean 70

All we wished to see 71

Dearest love 72

The gathering 73

For whom you are suffering 74