my tendency is to laugh at my first impressions.
something in my history casts a sinister spell
that even the simplest question disperses.
delightful surprises arise when i go
beyond the first brush of my eyes.
followup questions are the love language
in my dialogue with life.
be honest:
is culture the ability
to sing the same songs together
in joyful abandon
with your neighbors?
is culture
a shared recipe,
or a coordinated
childcare plan?
is culture the fact that you’ve shopped
at the same Target,
or are recovering from the same expectation
to sit still and keep quiet?
is culture the purchase
of the right brand,
that signals casual,
but not struggling?
be honest:
what is culture,
to you,
and who
is left out?
are you
feeling proud
of your culture,
right now?
what opportunities to participate
in the culture you identify with
have you passed up because
you were too busy?
what happens
when no one
shows up
to cultural events?
be honest:
do the ones
who pay
your paycheck
have your back?
does your work
fulfill the standard
you set for yourself
at 20?
does access
to the levers of power
make your
family happier?
does the time you spend
at work compensate you
for the time you’ve lost
with your family?
be honest:
what the fuck
are we, as people
who love, doing here,
right now?
Let’s take a moment to say something out loud:
there’s a lot of terrible writing in the world;
and a lot of terrible writing is one of the reasons
many of our kids are not excited
to sit and squint and parse, under fluorescent
lighting, at desks that wreck their bodies, in rows
of kids, not allowed to wiggle or whisper
or pat a beat to read along to. Somewhere,
someone decided that rhythm and rhyme were not
important enough to take the time to craft.
Here’s what that someone wasn’t paying attention to:
Rhythm and rhyme unlock the neurotransmitters;
Dyspraxics, aphants, dysgrahics, and dyslexics
are often able to entrain to a rhythm, or find
a rhyme, if they know that one is coming:
(you’ve hopefully had that experience, haven’t you?, when
the person reading leaves out the last
word of the poem, and the word pops in your mind?)
(If you haven’t, you should try it with a friend).
When you recognize that the Odyssey and the Iliad
were part of an oral tradition, encoded in rhythms
and rhymes, and familiar phrases, that invited
memory to do the work of storytelling,
passed from tongue to tongue for about as long
as Europeans have occupied the Americas–
you might start to wonder which skills we should be
focusing on, when passing information
along to our kids, that we hope will be memorable.
You can do the human math–(I’ve done it,
and with confidence can say what I’m going
to say)–I guarantee you: many, if not most
of the poets and writers of ages past were people
who would have, today, been branded as neurodivergent;
for whom encoding a human event in a rhythm
was just the way they knew their brain would remember it;
and in doing so, made the event accessible
to shared, collective memory. ’cause if you listen,
you’ll hear the way these bite-sized pieces flow;
the calming force of human expectation,
and satisfaction of expectation, over,
and over, and over, and over, and over again,
like a crocheted blanket, wrapped around your shoulders,
that your grandmother made in a ridiculously short amount
of time. (who has time for that, these days?)
the paradox of the poet:
in the constant attempt
to make this human experience
more legible
and thus bring more closeness
between one’s closest relations
one often makes oneself
odd, unrecognizable
to the very hearts one wants to join.
it’s not their fault:
it’s just their way.
they are not actually doing anything.
be gentle with the poets among us:
try to notice, while they are alive,
a moment, when you describe something
in a way surprising to yourself.
reparations begin with children:
otherwise, in 80 years,
what can be said to have been repaired?
an interesting consequence of being both autistic and adhd is the push-pull, fast-slow, act-ruminate, interplay between these two processing styles, that beget strong long-arc themes: pattern-recognition, justice sensitivity, rejection-sensitive dysphoria; and also tolerance for ambiguity, conflict resolution, and a need to articulate the awkward unspoken paradox.
looked at as a snapshot, i can appear to be by turns reactionary, quick to judge, and disruptive; or emotionally flat, ruminative, or disengaged. It is this paradoxical dynamic that causes me to crave nuance, and reject binary paradigms; to love deeply and also feel hurt easily; to rejoice in a graceful solution, but also to be the first to point out the inconsistencies in that solution.
i make a lot of mistakes and missteps, but i process the consequences of those mistakes in granular detail, sometimes for decades. i will find myself advocating vociferously for an idea which i may have previously rejected; or stopped in my tracks, hearing a word, and becoming lost in contemplation of the moment that that word was formed in the mouth of the person who hadn’t heard it before, but deeply needed to articulate something that had not before been articulated.
i have a strong desire to connect with people directly and deeply; and yet, even after a moment of deep connection, that connection will not translate into immediate trust, which i only experience through myriad moments of connection over time, if at all.
what’s fascinating to me now is that the language for a person like me–autistic and adhd–are quite new constructions for qualities that have always been part of the human experience. they come to us from the mouths of scientists, who, to their credit, look at things for a long time and talk about them; but to their detriment, these terms arose as descriptions of difference relative to a norm, rather than as healthy human characteristics. this paradox is just information to be articulated and, hopefully, digested in the great body of human understanding.
love your neighbor, kill your idol, consider the consequences, and have a nicely nuanced day.
If action turns the world within,
Then who knows where the world begins?
If sitting still should make one smart,
Then who can make a piece of art?
when breadth and height themselves are clear,
what then, when depth and time appear?
when space and time the self erode,
where, then, is found a safe abode?
bereft of home, can being be?
can being, without a center, see?
and seeing implies a pair of eyes:
what of the nose, and ears, and thighs?
and shapes that intersections bring
to bear upon this living thing –
if thingness is perceived at all.
what one, within the large, is small?
the faces in the clouds seem real;
a moment later: smell-hear-feel.
tasting something true, one finds
the thought that what is wound unwinds.
movement, stillness, presence, time:
what’s the nature of a rhyme?
if one aspires to advocate, one is wise to watch the baby.
the baby is the perfect advocate,
advocating directly for their own needs.
(may all our babies’ needs be met,
directly)
one is wise to meet the baby’s needs, directly,
knowing where a baby with unmet needs is liable to be led.
only the wise know this.
(who is listening?)
who hears the baby’s advocacy and jumps to meet the baby’s needs?
only the wise.
(and the wise are very few)
(maybe only you are listening,
wise one)
here’s what i’m trying to reconcile, sweetie,
some of us recognize that we maybe only have five days left to connect with our loved ones,
while others feel that time is endless, and we’ll always have another chance, in the future, to eventually connect with our loved ones.
and those of us who recognize that we maybe only have five days left are recognizing that we’re not hearing from the loved ones who we want to be connected with, in our last five days.
we’re recognizing that we might not be the ones that our loved ones want to be connected with in their last five days.
how do we reconcile this, with our loved ones?
how do we stay connected, even in tiny ways, that don’t evoke a sense of obligation to make some kind of ultimate connection?
i miss you, sweetie. our connection means the world to me, even in the tiniest of ways.
time is silently ticking by, behind all of our big feelings about how we’re supposed to connect, and how we’re feeling disconnected from our world.
within all of these big feelings, just know that a ‘hi’ or an emoji is enough.
you are exactly enough.
i love you, sweetie. i want to be connected to you in the ways that you want to be connected to.
mostly, i just love you.
so.
much.
