Towards the end of 2003, I wrote a series entitled 30 Sonnets on Autism, inspired by the experience of spending six months living with an autistic child. I never put these poems into electronic format and had thought them lost; but today, by chance, they turned up again among my papers.
The title was a deliberate misnomer in every respect. The poems are not sonnets; they are not even really poems: more splinters of disconnected consciousness. Neither are they really about autism, in so far as it is impossible to write about autism, or, for that matter, on, in, or even around the condition. They are more about my relationship with the boy’s mother and use autism as a metaphor for dealing with the ultimate impossibility of love. They also harp on themes that recur throughout my work, such as the fluidity of prepositions and pronoun ambiguity.
Most of these pieces include at least one allusion to a well-known philosophical or literary quotation twisted into an awkward paradox or fallacy. I therefore submit two of these pseudo-sonnets in response to this week’s Poetry Rehab Fallacy prompt. https://wordpress.com/read/post/feed/31982590/886096638
Sonnet on Autism #9
close all stores, eyes & mouths
or better still just close
because we who are already always
closed as blessed stones know
there is no blooming reason
to flower out into the world
& make a mess of it
as we will
we will our selves into being
because we are pulled by others
who cannot really love us
you close off to a point
& knowing that there is no point
point to that
with my closed eyes in your hands
& we are somehow close
Sonnet on Autism #19
between between
there is a little double world
that you are too familiar with
& I am not
beyond in
there is something better
that makes you bothered & bored
with mere being in the world
you hit me because you can see
through the lie of preposition
I hug you because I cannot
I love you
because you cannot lie
when you play with my toes as if they were yours
Poetry, Politics and Language 
Brilliant. They sing to me, both but the first, the most. For the second, there would need to be two.
Thank you for your kind comments, Liz. There are 28 more of these that I am currently working on revising and they are all connected in some way.
I look forward to reading more of them. Thanks!
Hi Liz, I really appreciate your feedback and want to learn as much as possible from it, as I greatly admire your own work, even though, or perhaps because, it is obviously very different from mine. You said that the second of these sonnets “should be two.” I blithely assumed that you meant that it should be split into two poems, or accompanied by another, but I am thinking now that you meant something deeper and more challenging….a task that I would most certainly welcome…
Looking back at my own comment…You’re right to say that it does not mean there should be a second sonnet. Not sure how to be clear. It has to do with how many “things” exist. When I was quite young, it seemed to me that everything existed in my own mind. Every dialogue was a monologue. Whatever happened was somehow created by my own mind. (I was responsible for everything that went wrong or right. As though the universe were a playing cards construction that my mind had made when I wasn’t looking.) That is what the first poem. tasted like For the second to be “real”, there must be two “I’s”. Two sets of toes. There is touching of a different sort. A looking in from the outside on both parts. And all of that is “not quite”, but I hope it makes sense of my comment.
Thank you for the clarification. You are right that there is a certain solipsism to the first poem that is negated by the second. The series as a whole oscillates between a sense of being ‘locked-in’ and various degrees of uncomfortable relation to others. The message, if there is one, is that it is sometimes when we are at our least communicative, in the conventional sense, that we come closest to one another, so long as tolerance of difference prevails.