He always wanted to say things, but no one understood.
He always wanted to explain things but no one cared.
So he drew.
Sometimes he would draw and it wasn't anything.
He wanted to carve it in stone or write it in the sky.
He would lie out on the grass and look up at the sky and it would be him and the sky and the things that needed saying.
It was after that, that he drew the picture.
It was a beautiful picture.
He kept it under his pillow and would let no one see it, and it was all of him, and he loved it. When he started school he brought it with him.
Not to show anyone, but just to have with him like a friend.
It was funny about school, he sat in a square, brown desk like all the other desks and he thought they should be red.
And his room was a square, brown room like all the other rooms.
And it was tight and close and stiff.
He hated to hold the pencil and chalk, with his arm stiff and his feet flat on the floor, stiff, with the teacher watching and watching.
And then he had to write numbers, and they were worse than letters that could be something if you put them together.
And the numbers were tight and square and he hated the whole thing.
The teacher came and spoke to him.
She told him to wear a tie like all the other boys.
He said he didn't like them and she told him it didn't matter.
After that he drew yellow and it was the way he felt about morning,
and it was beautiful.
The teacher came smiling at him.
"What's this?", she asked, "Why don't you draw something like Ken's drawing? Isn't that beautiful?"
It was all questions.
After that his mother bought him a tie and he always drew airplanes and rocket ships like everyone else.
And he threw the old picture away.
And when he lay out on the grass alone looking at the sky, it was big and blue, and all of everything,
but he wasn't no more.
He was square inside, and brown, and his hands were stiff, and he was like anyone else.
But he wasn't anymore.
And the thing inside that needed saying didn't need saying anymore.
It had stopped pushing.
It was crushed.
Stiff.
Like everything else.