Riot! 'til the Pigs Go To Sleep
From a Schizoid to a Human Artist

Kofi Fosu Forson

I've been mad in this life. Think Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh. Think the emotional playing field of Apocalypse Now. Circumstances surrounding, people are forced to care. People are inspired to give a damn. You see this in the ghetto. You see this in crime families. You see this in poverty.

I was forced to give a damn. I was forced to attempt to kill my psychoses. Put an end to this malady. I tried to kill myself. Death is so easy. It's the planning stages that take forever.

My malady has always been a combination of sex and art. Mother's boy. I wouldn't call it an addiction but my mother and I had always had a special relationship. It was what it was: intellect and emotional incest.

My mother the original woman Eve is the most intelligent woman. She comes from a matriachal family of cultured men. I've been subject to this creativity. My mother's role in my life has always been more than just mother. We were independently born of love as a symbol and as mother and son we were partners in discourse. Our conversations were brilliant often inspiring talk among those who listened. During this moment of turmoil she was my savior. My only friend. My only means of love, hope and life.

So it can be said this my life is one of language extracted from the models of love, sex and art. I became this very vision more an idea than a person. The person that I was more or less was shattered. Conclusively I lived a life of stress without the resolution on sex which flowed from celibacy to random sexual acts.

Theater defined the muse for me. In it I was able to solve the complexities of gender issues, subjects on the masculine and feminine. I also used this as a means of rendering my personal and sexual relations to women.

The decade of the 90's had encouraged a lot of intellectual light. In the decade of the 2000's I was able to put it to use exorcising that very turmoil of love and sex.

As an artist I had then defined myself. To then become a human person was the next mission. My emotional poverty could then only afford me housing probabilities with other men who had emotional difficulties. This has been the greatest undertaking of my life where I've had to live with men I had never met before who had been tormented by addictions, fear and abuse. The many of them were homeless in a previous life. They were from the street. I had to learn how to adapt to the trickery, the deceit, the violence, the drugs. This has defined me for life.

So as time would prove I am less the functioning artist more so a human person. The circumstances of my background as an artist has never left me and it never will. I have conditioned myself to use the formula for art that is the envisioning of an idea with image, sound and text and apply it to rammifications in my daily life.

My mind has gone from a thing, a concept to a machine, an operating entity, livable specimen able to paint scenarios not with a brush and canvas but the usage of the mental playground and atmosphere.

I think back on the friends I've known this past decade and I say not one would I befriend now. Not one would recognize this person. Not one would know how to love me now.