I am: yet what I am none cares or knows:
 My friends forsake me like a memory lost
I am the self-consumer of my woes-
 They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes-
And yet I am, and live-like vapors tossed

 Into the nothingness of scorn and noise
   Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
  But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems:
Even the dearest, that I love the best,
and strange -nay rather stranger than the rest

I long for scenes where man has never trod
  A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Ceator,God,
   And sleep as I in childhood slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
  the grass below- above the vaulted sky,


You would have a very hard heart indeed not to have pity for Clare and to hear the utter truth sincerity and pathos of I Am (written along with hundreds of other poems)while he was confined in the General Lunatic Asylum in Northampton where he spent about a third of his life...this seems at times to be our lunatic asylum and...

it seems as if some sort of similar struggle for recognition of I Am is part of what we're about here..?