[Continuing the process of posting my previously unpublished longer poems on this blog, today I post a batch of five of my Thirty Sonnets on Autism.

This series of thirty poems, which I first wrote fourteen years ago and have never published in their entirety, are some of the most complex I have ever penned. Although ostensibly inspired by living with an autistic child, they are in fact more about a turbulent relationship with his mother and the main message of the series, I suppose, thus involves the ultimate impossibility of communication and therefore also of love, which is (ironically for a poet) a recurrent theme in my work.

Autism appears here both more straightforwardly as a metaphor for miscommunication and more complicatedly as the source of a kind of borrowed non-language, in which the author is far from fluent, but which he attempts to use in the hope that this might somehow bridge the gap.

As a whole, the series has a very troubling tone and the themes it covers range widely from philosophical metaphysical and religious ones to those of a more emotional and sexual nature. The poems often chop up familiar philosophical, biblical and literary quotations in a perverse way, rendering them virtually unintelligible. They are interspersed with psycho-analytical language, without this providing any resolution whatsoever. The conclusion seems to be that the autistic boy in fact makes far more sense than we supposedly normal human beings usually do. Nonsense makes more sense than sense.

This batch of five forms a thematically consistent unit within the second half of the sequence. Sonnet on Autism #19 has already been published in an earlier post.]

Sonnet on Autism #18

Every magus must have his wand.

But, unlike you,

it is not usually in his mouth.

You have no urge

to effect an illusion

in the minds of others that you cannot know,

still less to pretend your magic

controls a real world.

*

You know there is a space

between truth and illusion

and that it is too comfortable for comfort,

twitch and cry for release.

But I cannot help you.

For you have already fallen through the interstices of the world.

*

Yet, if my hand cannot reach out to yours

and bring you back to somewhere you have never been,

I am tempted to let you drag me down—

take me with you,

angel who is never fallen

always gliding on the fall.

 

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.

 

Sonnet on Autism #20

you know there is no such thing as in

and therefore seek it desperately,

like a thing we cannot say

that cannot say we

*

you are always beside yourself

and never in yourself

because you know

in is a lie

*

but you lie so peacefully in sleep

as I twitch and turn

bothered by the world

*

I am not really in the in

that gadflies you by day

that every day your absence of an in prods me towards

 

Sonnet on Autism #21

I do not know why they think

me wise

and you an idiot

or all manner of other technical things in the same vein

*

I call you wise

and you respond

and we know that you are the wisest idiot

of all

who has opted to withdraw

totally from the social world

and yet come back from time to time

*

to prod us from our lazy unreason

and remind us that Platonic solids

must be separate

not prettily imposed upon one another

as the schoolbook so foolishly guides

and mean so much more than us

in their faraway land of forms.

 

Sonnet on Autism #22

You vanish into the vanishing

point of reason,

wishing you were not here.

And I am tempted

by your total attempt,

and tried

and judged,

because I feel

your way of being still

will still be in the world,

when mine is not

and long forgotten and gone.