Tag Archives: autism spectrum disorder

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Threads (for Autistics Speaking Day, 2011)

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,–
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile…
— Paul Laurence Dunbar

One might believe that there is an incongruity
within a doctor who can rescue a young toddler
playing in a sea of vomit inside of a South Indian hut
eviscerated by a village’s cholera outbreak, but yet
finds himself becoming windswept detritus tossed
from coast to coast by a stomach which demands
a constant schedule. One might place
his wide-armed compassion of raising that boy himself
and his Richter scale tremors at finding his office disturbed
as light-and-dark contrast Polaroids, and wonder
if the two men were even the same:
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My Poem “Lamppost Hierophant” Published in Shift Journal

Greetings, RWP Readers!

One of my poems, “Lamppost Hierophant” was published today at Shift Journal. It had been written for Sam Drezner, the son of documentary filmmaker Todd Drezner. His latest documentary, “Loving Lampposts” takes a look at his son’s autism, neurodiversity, and the current autism debates.

Go check out the poem. And while you’re at it, take a look at the rest of Shift Journal as well. It’s an eclectic publications whose contributors attempt to define autism as a legitimate way of being in the world.

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NaPoWriMo Poem #13: Pretending to Be Normal (Eye Contact)

If you try to look into my eyes
you might succeed, if only for a moment
until I feel your gaze incise
and my skin wires buzz with too much current.
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NaPoWriMo #2: Lamppost Hierophant

for Sam Drezner

There are four of them.
Each day, the sun rises and warms our faces in the East.
Each day, we breathe out the smoke of our spirits until it is spent.
And each day, you are divining these lampposts.
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WWP Poem #30: Paint by Numbers

i. zero

Nobody knows that this thing
isn’t a bandit: it doesn’t seize you suddenly
and leave you awash in open wire and stereo speakers
jammed into your ears. There is only the
curious brown baby, eyes like cameras,
with a wound-up roll of film for a brain.
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WWP Poem #27: Fifteen

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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WWP Poem #19: Dear Earthling

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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NaPoWriMo Poem #28: Letter to My Father

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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NaPoWriMo Poem #26: Box

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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Protected: NaPoWriMo Poem# 24: Scapegoat

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NaPoWriMo Poem #19: Unravel

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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NaPoWriMo Poem #18: Dust

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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