A Life Poetic

My life as an Autistic person has been marked by some powerful experiences. I wanted to share some poetry that expresses my experiences as a child, as an institutionalised teen and of finding community.

Clamoring

it is clamoring
turned up too loud
the branch scraping on the gutter
at the back of her mind
ever clamoring,
relentless,
no peace,

a past waiting to be rediscovered
cracks opened by her words
and an existence starved of meaning
yet seeming meaningful

where did she come from?

ever pacing
up and back,
up and back
through her mind

its grubby hands
over her mouth
and the feeling
that if she were sick now she would drown

it’s there clamoring
breaking pieces off her soul.

in a small room
fists slam home,
they stare ice
shards of ice
through her soul

this is the past or part of it?

‘are you in there
are you still there
or did you leave for another planet -
probably did
f**k knows
let’s go find someone else’

never knowing the word no
or having the power to use it
never tasting the truth
or an approximation of humanity

she would ask for punishment
if she thought it would help
but another’s tongue is swift enough
and relentless without rhyme or reason.

they marked her from early on
and marched her through her childhood
tasting blood more times than she should have

teeth meeting her knuckles
sometimes brought relief
from the seemingly painless
baptism of human chemical flight.

Institution

Fear ate her a path to its door.
Once inside, the four walls contained her.
And for keeping’s sake they named her.
She stayed there under sedation.
This, a double incarceration.

Lucidity left her
and she stumbled
through halls and doorways,
weeks and months.

A hole where her thoughts should be,
faces talked at her, assuring her,
that this was a better kind of reality.

When she looks back now
she knows she suffered
under the cure regime they proffered.

Not just a question of chemistry,
she now knows her brain works differently.
Not a split or a schism, she has Autism.

Traffic

What pills proffered,
numb the traffic of the mind.

seated in the stark room she bathes
in emotion
suspended between the past and the present
robbed of the moment –
grasping at the liminal
shaping the ether with her subconscious
reality fragmented
walls splintering
senses overwhelmed by open space.
Choice mediated
by a chemical straight jacket.

The Lost Soul?

You came to drive her
out of the back of her mind.
But in the back of your mind
there is doubt
as to whether you have the right
to be pursuing the root of her ‘madness’.

She would offer it to you
in all of its complexities
but fear of the unknown
would eat a hole
in the fabric of your existence.

You can be assured though
that there are others like her
who will hold a mirror to your soul.

Ythanya of Aspergia

She is unsure of what she makes of first light
for she hasn’t seen it for so long.
She has kept strange hours.
The days awaited so eagerly by all her kind
have come upon her, almost unannounced.

Since Saturn returned,
time passing has been punctuated
by a desire to achieve.
A path unfurls before her.

She has come to realise
her seeking days are at and end.
She now stands before the rising sun
an initiate to her people