Two of my poems have been published at Awe in Autism, a website dedicated to art created by autistic people (or by people writing about autism). My two poems are “Asperger’s” and “Other.” Since discovering I have Asperger’s (autism, according to the DSM-5), I have been working out how I feel about it. Yes, we do have feelings! We often just have difficulties articulating those feelings. For someone like me, poetry truly is an attempt to say the unsayable.
Of course, from a certain perspective all my poems are “autistic poems,” since they are poems written by an autistic person and thus are necessarily from an autistic perspective, but not all poems are explicitly about the experience of being autistic. But a few are, such as those mentioned above.
Here is a more recent poem I wrote on what it’s like to be autistic:
My Burning Heat, My Light
My friends, acquaintances are blistered, red
From my white coals–I’m meaning well, but dread
Is why I’ve bred from blackened soles and strife.
You dance around me–each flame feels a knife–
I only want a welcome warmth to wed
Your weary soul to mine–I find instead
I only seem to transform every life.
I cannot seem to follow, lead–I stand
Alone–too conscious, too oblivious–
I know each of the rules and cannot play.
You’re standing on the boat that you call land–
When I shine light, my flame’s called dangerous–
You’ll die of lies so long as I don’t stay.
You can find pretty much all of my poems at Thyme and Time Again.
This is beautiful! Congratulations on your getting published, too! Howdy from a former DFW resident (Frisco, although I vastly prefer Richardson and would have liked to live there instead!), now in San Antonio 😁👋🏼💙
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Thank you. I’m glad you like my poems.
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I do indeed 👍🏼💓
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Be sure an visit my poetry blog, then! 🙂
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But of course 😁💟💟
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Troy, you found words for things I didn’t know there were even words to describe! An incredible poem!
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Thank you very much. I’ll try to post more poems in the future.
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