You, perceptive enough to pick up
all the half-rhymes hanging out in your stomach;
you, with a galvanized ear leading to tubules
that course straight up into your brain;
you, possessing databanks built out of flesh
humming in data process heaven just behind your bone walls;
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I.
I’ve been collecting music and pouring it into the coffers of my brain
since I was fifteen. It took a few years for me to understand
that the stereo inside my cranial walls needed more stuff to spin, so I
reached out in raven-claw fashion, stealing everything
I could get my ears on. Trailing behind me is the umbra
of a greedy teenage girl trapped in a good two-shoes, church girl headlock
while sneaking sonic pleasures through the back door of
her ears. Hey all you people that tryin’ to sleep,
I’m out to make it with my midnight dream.
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As I mentioned in this post, I received an Naturally Autistic Awards from the ANCA Foundation in the International Adult Literary category at their awards ceremony yesterday in Vancouver, BC. I was presented the award for an unpublished collection of poems, “Novena”.
I was unable to attend the ceremony, but recorded one of the poems in the collection, “You Don’t See It”, to be played at the awards. I am sharing it with you, embedded below into this post.
-Nicole
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You’d think me rude, but I’d just stand and stare
while grocery store aisles used to jostle together,
every box and can a hungry puzzle piece
looking for its partner;
or the colors on every shirt, sweater, pant, and shoe
in every department store peeled themselves apart from their host
in paint by numbers precision and begged for my eye
to roll call. You’d think me strange,
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I am a box of nerves,
a bead curtain of tangled arteries: messengers,
blue and livid in the sunlight. They are
wire sapphires running silent underneath this skin
of clothes. Point to point heartbeats traveling up and down
my limpid tubes, my wonderlands in lapis lazuli.
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Dear Dad: have you ever seen the
burning blade, the straight edge of a knife’s
tongue? From this, we are branded with bruises. This silence,
this tradition of disguise, is a generational curse,
a baton passed from Grandma to you to
me – and I am still running.
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There is a box. It is
wooden, a mistreated servant made out of
rot and blood stains. It holds
some of my years, the ones where
the mirror looked like broken teeth and empty
bedrooms. Sycamore legs that looked like
fear, shaking and stripped of bark to show
the white underneath. Prom nights, spent at home,
full of wishes that I could emerge, full-winged, instead of
an earthbound thing, soft and hairy, many-legged, with a upturned belly
like a dog’s fear gone white and asking for teeth. And a
tattered gospel, its chapter and verse preached to me
in slaps and insults.
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You think that I’m brave to tug at my own skin,
pull on the little ends of yarn that I see poking out:
little parades of frayed cotton trees in every color. I have
thousands of them, most of them congregating up and down
my spine. But the truth is,
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I used to believe in you.
Your name was Normal. You were a fantastic idol,
a phantasm made out of God, pedestal-high,
queen of all things that I could never touch. You
wore my face like perfection even better than I did. Body
shrunken to the size of late night cock dreams. You
had no script, nothing to consult – the words were just
sliding through your brain, reconstructing every synapse like
mere connections between hemisphere and region were not
enough. And I,
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