you cannot write an autism poem
without becoming: a diagnostic framework; that running
gag where autism speaks but can autism shut the fuck up?
the hypothetical apocalypse of your birth; the abstraction
of your death; that thimerosal-baby; some starseed shrouded
in miracle; their mandatory generosity; a puzzle piece carved
into your mother’s calf; your individualized education plan;
the savant; the savant of your smile rehearsing itself to the
mirror; that crooked kaleidoscope; that electroshock collar;
a constant becoming and constant cure; a cure for that cure;
a cure for that mask sewn to your face in the shape of your
face; a listform; another list of forms: ballad of baby-babble
sonnet of strobe-light, blank-verse gone nonverbal; a rubric
and you failed it: failed it, failed it, fail— call this anaphora
or echolalia. you’ll never know when to shut the fuck up.
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals*
& i am no stranger to snuff films: shaky cam & cock-kaleidoscope,
glitter-dipped daggers & the landline clicks:
what’s your favorite scary mov— i go quiet
on set: enter
two boys cosplaying as men cosplaying as boys.
we dirty the frame until we’re filthy. try car-
play: thrust-theatre,
prop-condoms & power differentials, ketchup
for blood. you’ll play ghostface, vocoder & virgin-fetish.
i’ll play perfect victim.
call cut. try knifeplay. i method-act
as my corpse & the academy awards me best supporting actor
to my gunshot wounds, the statuette’s
stomach chipped in your honor.
in the silent movie, the orgasm is only the scream
& i am no stranger to snuff films: i google
my murderer & find your IMDB page
linked to my IMDB page— i’m the nameless extra
in your dashcam footage & like any dashing
gentleman, you terrified me,
whispered: what’s your favorite scary movie?
& it’s that one where you block
my number, where the end-
credits roll before the slasher even arrives.
& don’t forget. i auditioned for this.
i begged & balladeered for this, swallowed sword
& semen, pre-screened for phone-sex shrieker, landed the role of
road & road-killer, r-rated ratings-bomber.
& i am no stranger to snuff films,
but i am only the stranger, the spam caller, the starlight spilled
like semen from the statuette’s stomach.
i’m the space reserved for your sequel & yes my love,
i’m ready to shoot:
Title Quote Attr. to Susan Sontag in The Pornographic Imagination
The Wikipedia List of Unsolvable Problems and their Corresponding Solutions
1. How can consciousness be defined? Can consciousness exist after death?
I once conjured my dead father via Ouija board. He said What happened
to the no contact order? Ha! I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe in
haunting: phantasmagoria of memory. I spoke to the limp plastic-baggie
of him and it listened. His name, sharpied on Ziploc, shimmered. I asked
the Ouija board: how’s Hell?? and he said: Hot?? He got funnier in death.
There’s no Hell. He’s nowhere. But I’m half-convinced he’s reading this.
2. Could a probabilistic model accurately predict the lifetime of humanity?
Dad moonlit as a doomsday prepper. Mom blamed National Geographic.
His alleged apocalypses varied: solar flares or polar shifts or it’s something
about the power grid? Imagine His backyard-shed bunker, His makeshift
throne of milk-cartons. Dad died before the world, and the shed stunk of
spoiled peaches, roach-ridden rice. Dad and I’d rehearse our bug-out plan.
Mom said that if/when the rapture came, she’d sit and wait for God to die.
3. Ideopathy refers to diseases of apparent spontaneous origin. Find a cure?
Trick question. I don’t believe in spontaneous death. Want to know what
really killed Dad? Try a fistful of cigarettes. Untreated diabetes and end-
stage renal failure. Decades of Rush Limbaugh. That seizured slur of his
voice. Fistful of cigarettes until it’s just fists. Another unsigned divorce
paper. That one road-trip where the Jeep swerved onto the highway. And
me, I think. Yes. To survive it, I had to kill it, so whatever it is, I killed it.
4. Do black holes have an internal structure? If so, how might it be probed?
So bored of bigness. That vacuous vacuum of space. Dark matter doesn’t
matter here. Made myself endless. Collapsed inwards. So strong, nothing
escaped. Devoured gravity. Typhoon of funeral-wear on bedroom floor.
Swirl and I’m so self-centered. Light can’t live here. Sound can’t travel.
I cosplayed infinity, but I’d always end early. I vanish into life: that black
hole of my blackout curtains. In the eulogy, I called him an event horizon.
5. What caused multicellular life to rapidly accelerate in the Cambrian Era?
Philosophers need answers that don’t double as cemeteries. I philosophize
the Cambrian Era: unicellular splotches of life all somehow synchronized-
swam into life. So Dad was once a cephalopod was once its mitochondrion
was once atomic dust and now he’s regular dust. So, I ask the Ouija Board:
Was this apocalypse or anti-apocalypse? Both. Birth and burial at sea. Mom
loves the ocean’s gentle vastness, that waterlogged garden of life. I want to live.
And Another Apocalypse
after Angels in America by Tony Kushner
I respected the delicate ecology of my delusions;
I mistook it for Rapture. If God abandoned us,
I abandoned Him first. Ha! Book of Revelatio–
I skimmed it. Got bored of biblical. And did
I hallucinate the angel’s billion-eyed airstrike?
I acid-tripped into Aleph: a firebomb squad
I called anything but death. Glittering death.
I doomscroll: baby-amputees, carbon-sinks.
I stop & I shouldn’t. Took sixty-seven shots;
I chugged gasoline & transformed into AK-47.
I woke from that stress-dream into another.
I prayed. God served moldy loaves. Rank fish.
I gobbled it up, pretended to puke. At age 10,
I hyperfixated on the apocalypse. Seriously,
I imagined myself as Katniss Everdeen. Ha!
I wanted the world to end without an ending.
I progressed like a tumor. Terminal, crazy &
I mean, I was too young to believe in sickness.
I refused to drown in the poisoned ocean. But
I fished in it. Caught botulism from bad beef.
I deregulated. Free market and I’m worthless.
I star-spangled my coffin then refused to die in it.
I lost my voice to the rocket’s red glare. Damn!
I forgot imagination can’t create anything new.
I took my time. I took dollar-store painkillers &
I woke up groggier, less capable. Less possible.
I tough-loved the world until it loved me back.
I paid my taxes. I believed in it: our goodness.
I do. I still do. I can’t tell if that’s a lie. Perhaps
I could call myself oracle. Oh, what a shitshow!
I wound up as oracle? World’s shittiest prophet?
I refuse Rapture and Heaven. Enter Angel: Hark!
I Arrived! Great Work Begins! Anti-apocalypse,
I believe in you. So forgive me! But you can’t!
I witnessed the flies rotting in the corpses, then
I heard grown men laugh at the sight of it. Ha!
I will do the great work! God willing, I will try!
I felt God spit in my face & I kissed his cheek.
I’m not brave.
Meryl Streep
It was either a dream or the deprivation of it. I’m too chickenshit for hallucinogenics,
but still, I craved escape, conspired against all logics & here’s the part I must whisper:
Scholars believe sleeplessness is next to godliness. It’s another, looser mode of seeing.
I drank cold-brew past-noon; misplaced my melatonin gummies; doom-scrolled until
blue-light invaded my dopamine receptors; pulled an all-nighter and then an all-dayer
until about 83 hours in, I stare-contest the ceiling & all the tiles slow-motion mosaic
into a face. Instantly, I knew this was God. Another look & I realized it was actually
Meryl Streep, but I couldn’t tell if it was Devil Wears Prada Meryl Streep or Sophie’s
Choice Meryl or (God/Meryl forbid) The Iron Lady Meryl Streep. Omnipotent Meryl
Streep grins from my ceiling & I hadn’t even won my first Oscar yet. How absolutely
tragic. A million Meryl Streeps & all of them with impeccable accent work. How does
she make it look so natural? I stare into the altar of Meryl’s cheekbones. Meryl speaks:
Your problem is that you haven’t got the courage for this fight & she says that so sweetly,
I forget that’s indeed a quote from Iron Lady & indeed, I haven’t got the courage to
fight God as Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. That’s Meryl’s trick. Like God, Meryl
can play anything, be anything & I’d believe it. She doesn’t need to dream. She just Is:
Meryl Fucking Streep, record-winner of 21 Academy Award nominations & suddenly!
life’s an actors roundtable: Charlize Theron & Anne Hathaway & Meryl Streep & me,
somehow me. We exchange monologues & they’re all so kind when I attempt an Irish
accent. Cate Blanchett recommends her dialect coach. Margot Robbie suggests inner-
child work. Is this what fame really feels like? Like divinity? Meryl Streep laughs & I
giggle, because I haven’t slept in 89 hours & I’m so slap-happy, but also because like…
Duh! It’s Meryl Streep! A hyperreal hallucinatory metaphor of Meryl or maybe God(??)
so I figure… why not inquire about the universe? & here’s the part I really-really must
whisper, silent as sacrament: I ask Meryl Streep if she’s actually God & of course Meryl
Streep is God. Meryl Streep plays everyone including God & including Me & also I lied,
I thought I lied in bed, but I lied about that part. It wasn’t the ceiling I stare-contested
but my bathroom mirror (this according to Meryl Streep). The actors roundtable as my
congregation, Meryl Streep as Holy Ghost, I panicked. I’m not a skilled enough actor
to play God. So I’m shame-sobbing in what I think is either purgatory or my bedroom
& hey wait I’m dreaming!! So I can go anywhere but all I can dream is stock footage of
a meadow & specifically it’s the Windows XP screensaver meadow with a Getty Images
watermark. I needed a mythology but mine was too shallow. I invented the wrong God.
I’m the dummy-god of this dummy-digital-meadow until I stare-contest the Sun & that’s
Meryl Streep’s face in the Sun like that Sun Baby in the Teletubbies & like… why not??
Meryl Streep shoves a bottle of melatonin gummies into my mouth & I say I’ll miss you
Meryl & she insists I refer to her only as Meryl Streep because we aren’t friends like that.
I have no religion save for Meryl Streep. I’ve never prayed & believed in it. No worship
for me, I think. I want to be God, but I miss Meryl Streep & God, I missed myself too.
For A Brief Bout of Childhood, I Developed An Intense Autistic Hyperfixation on Doomsday Preppers & Lowkey… I Started Rooting For The Apocalypse.
after Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss
It was all I’d been waiting for my whole little life
but I’d never survive it. I couldn’t afford
the tools. Yellowstone Supervolcano—
Silly to say, since no, I didn’t live nearly
within 1000 km of the caldera, but hear me
out here: the ash would infect the clouds
and turn our lungs to concrete and boom!
I’d spontaneously combust into my own grave,
and nobody’d ever visit. Or Electromagnetic
Pulse— my Nintendo Wii would crash, and
I was a lonely child; lonely, half-stable and well
past the part where I was cute, and I deserved
to be lonely, so I couldn’t survive the Wii–
pocalypse. I tried a Faraday Cage.
But I quickly knew that I didn’t know
how a Faraday Cage even worked,
so for about two weeks I slept in aluminum
foil and begged Mom for silver coins,
as if I’d ever be any good at bartering.
Pandemics— I loved any type of illness
I could maybe avoid. That was my chosen
fantasy. Oh, every prepper chooses their ideal
apocalypse, as in: Dad wanted looters
to shoot and I got good at faking sick
so might as well fake healthy. Nobody else
wants a plague. On Doomsday Preppers,
nobody stockpiles for any of the real disasters
and honestly, I don’t blame them
because I don’t think they’d actually survive it.
I think they’d play war-king in a community
garden, or they’d get shot with their own gun
and everybody’d be like: The apocalypse
of dipshittery just ended! Hooray! and they’d be right.
Like I said but couldn’t know; there’s other doomsdays,
like credit-card debt and staph infections,
and I’m still eating canned food, so what now?
I was a lonely child. I’m a lonelier adult.
The world wasn’t ending, but hey, I still stood
on the train-tracks with my eyes shut, and yes,
I feel melodramatic saying it like that, and yes,
I didn’t stand there for long, but long enough
to know: I’m no survivalist.
Not even when it’s easy. Especially not when
it’s real. I can’t afford the tools, so sure,
go ahead and loot me. Just take it:
The Faraday Cage. The clouds of dense ash.
The toy coins. The train-track. Four seasons
of Doomsday Preppers. My education.
Sonnet Written In Person-First Language
Person With Autism or Autistic Person?
— A Debate in the Autism Community
PERSON-FIRST LANGUAGE standardizes shame, severs soul from spirit [but still, if I’m a
person, well-versed in my personhood, I’m only a person the way a mannequin qualifies as
person: deferred to houseparty wallpaper, wallflower in reverse-bloom], so I switch to second
-person. You rehearsed [but still, you small-talk so small you go molecular, vanish into a nothing
person at worst, person-with-nothingness at somehow worse]. You carry your nothingness like a
purse on your person: pursed lips & prop-smile. The audience applauds, but any reasonable
person, uncoerced by politeness, could (with good intent!) mistake you for that mannequin:
person cursed by silence. So you embody wallpaper, abstract into escape hatch [but still, I’m a
person, my twenty-first birthday and I’m lonely. It’s so lonely, being more concept than
person: a botched birth, impending hearse]. Person With implies a Person Without, implies
person nursed into personhood: prop severed from stage, the half-hearted miracle of me, a
person immersed in my standardized shame. My nothingness. Yeah, it’s humiliating to be a
person, unrehearsed, but I can’t sever mind from body. I’m the saddest-weirdest-nothingest
person who traversed into this houseparty, and goddamnit if I’m not that mannequin, that
person unearthed from the periphery. I carry him home, and he’s heavy at first [but still, he’s a
person].
Ars Poetica?
avoid absolutes. avoid the absolution of metaphor: the selves fractured into infinity,
frenzied by that treeless forest, gutted by that bladeless dagger, buried in the grave-
less cemetery. avoid that endless gaze inwards, that spiral outwards. avoid the self
still unsure of itself, the self toddling towards selfhood. the best writing is universal
but avoid universality. avoid potential. avoid precision and prescription. do not tell.
do not abstract your body into some sunless sky or stormless storm or selfless self.
and when you murder, show the body, your body. bloody it. try an active verb. try
to try. try to mourn. try to bury. stop trying so hard. sometimes, i worry over poetry,
how it contorts body into image, self-into-sonnet-into-starlight-into-saddest-self,
so that’s the last time i’ll ever use the word body or trauma or cleave or any metaphor
involving a bird. i’m writing about fucking up my life before i’m old enough to stop
fucking up my life and i can’t even conjure up any concrete details. so… what do you
wanna know? i could describe the wrinkled maid’s outfit, the glimmering row of F’s
on my transcript, the lexapro i never took, the sound of the pill bottles shaking like
maracas, the prayer i stopped praying because i didn’t want to not pray well enough.
abstraction is a violence of distance. avoid endlessness but imagine an endless row
of glossy magazines and some pop-psychologist guru spouting some You Are Only
The Universe Experiencing Itself bullshit on every endless cover but try to believe it.
try illustrating yourself with no artifice, no frills, and oh god—is that it? i cannot tell
the difference between a universe and a void. if i am endless, i am endlessly small.
i am collapsing in on myself.