show me your life

SUPPORTING REAL STORIES GALLERY FOUNDATION: BOYS AT RISK: SHOW ME YOUR LIFE.

The Smash Street Boys are gifting their art portfolios to contributors to the non-profit, Real Stories Gallery Foundation. The boys remain indefatigable, and reach for whatever hope they can find. Or create.

I teach boys you see as hopeless. They kinda think that, too. But they are conflicted.

They live among you.

The AIDS orgs and the CDC bemoan the fact that such feral animals are impossible to reach. Street kids. Addicted kids. Boys from affluent families are not immune. There is NO immunity.

They can be reached. You have to come way too close for comfort to walk around inside their shoes.

A CDC suit CDC lecturing to them on the Internet is absurd.

Get real.

Street kid is a stereotype, but then we live with stereotypes for the sake of understanding the little boxes we employ to create representations of kids who have always been marginalized.

How can it be a surprise that they turn to sex work. To survive. No one ever talks about the hard to reach and stable housing.

They run away. It’s a crime. You can get locked up for running away from a home where you are being abused. The kid becomes the criminal.

Juvenile holding facilities are places of rape and violence. You don’t believe it. I know this: how does it matter what you believe. What you believe is ephemeral. You don’t want to believe it. After all, you’re only one lost little soul yourself coping with the big bad world.

You are not all that unlike them.

When people tell me that these kids are hard to reach, I’m thinking: No, it’s the mainstream culture that is hard to reach.

You turn them into criminals, and you throw them away.

After all, it’s so expensive.

Not if you were reaching them.

Addiction, too, is the Great Bugabuga in the Big Blue Sky. We write reams of poetry.

Because we have a lot to say.

Our current project is one where we are constructing art portfolios we are giving away as gifts to anyone who contributes to (non-profit) Real Stories Gallery Foundation. Click the link below.

Real Stories is where the rubber meets the road. You will find us there because that is where the stories of our lives get spilled out into a landscape where there are no easy answers.

I was once one of the kids I now only happen to teach. Who is teaching who.

But for grace itself, there goes the lot of us.