Waves
Did you ever let the whole world in
With a thought?
Were you ever told that one wave on the beach
Was the important one
And though you tried to catch it
It was drowned in the crashes and splashes
All around?
Autism isn’t separate and distant,
It’s a connection to everything;
The birdsong, the engine, the beams and the crackles.
You try to contain our love to just people.
You try to chain it, restrict it, explain it.
You live on a one-wave beach,
Neat and tidy, with carefully placed seashells.
I live in a tempest.
The sea roars, the wind whips, the sun shines rainbows through the vapour-mist.
There is no order,
Each sense demands no border.
There is passion
And fascination
And procrastination
Caught in the curve of a rolling wave.
Nothing is neat and tidy
Everything is movement.
I learned to drown out and focus.
I learned to mirror your one, grey, wave.
My world still roared;
Colour and motion
Caught in emotion,
And as I stand, in the pelting sands –
Hearing, feeling, touching, reeling –
You tell me how unemotional I am,
How little sense I make
When your waves break.
How alone you must be
With your sea,
For you to need a mirror-me
Autism and Expectations 
Reblogged this on AutistWanderer's Musings.
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Thank you 😊💐
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Thank you Rhi for making it available as a reading as well 🙂
Intriguing, so unusual, it feels like a paralel dimension which even though doesn’t let you through, makes its veil transparent, allowing a see-through…
Most peculiar…
Usually poetry, music and lyrics are the only bridge between my universe and the world outside, allowing me to connect not with people, but with their music and poetry…
I must confess, your poetry is probably my first encounter with another autistic’s poetry, and the ‘connection’ is so different that I have to develop some other touch of my senses in order to ‘feel’ your words…
You know, it’s like someone whose lost their sight at a later stage of their life, and it takes time to adjust.
How true it’s becoming that autistic communication is so different, so multidimensional, that even for another autistic it takes time to adapt and see beyond the veil.
I hope you don’t mind me sharing of my steps in discovering myself and other autistics as well 🙂
Thank you again and take care 👾
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Having studied poetry, it’s only recently that I’ve allowed myself to write in a way that actually reflects my own experience.
It can be hard to “see” the difference from this side of the pen. I’m letting the words settle as they want to, rather than pushing them to fit.
It’s all a bit of an experiment in expression 😄
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Now that you’ve initiated a bit of ‘talk’, I’ll come out of my shell and as a first step, absolutely agree.
Now I know it sounds cliche, but absolutely agreeing is what it truly is, about the inexplicably complicate difference between writing your thoughts, and your subconscious expressing itself freely…
In my poetry’s case, it oftentimes begins with an “overspill” of a few words or lines, which lures me to follow them. Now I could try to help them as you say, or just letting them ‘settle’ (excellent thought!).
And it’s like a pressure cooker, it takes time for the overspill pressure to accumulate; it’s what’s been once called the muse’s visit…
I’ve learned over the years that one doesn’t write poetry, but becomes a channel of poetry expressing itself from some other-dimensional, deep-seated plane of one’s existence, a subconscious melting pot of a uniquely personal vision and perspective of a hidden, priceless core.
And I’ll stop here, before switching over to my other worldly language 👾🖖
To be continued 🙂
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I love the idea of being a portal between here and there 😊
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And it’s the ‘here’ and ‘there’ which intrigues me, because while I seem to be living in a ‘here’ with its own expectations and expression criteria, mostly foreign to the ‘me’ which never aligned itself (sorry for using the neutral but it truly feels like the real, nevertheless still unknown ‘me’), nor conformed to these requirements, it is the ‘there’ which I would call “home”…
And I guess in between ‘here’ and ‘there’ there seems to be something similar to Freud’s “id” (less atavic though…) acting as a portal as you say, a portal giving itself to be open by either ‘ego’ or ‘superego’, always depending of whose watching/listening… And for us autistics, the ego is most of the time what “they” are allowed to see, with the superego being seen only by the initiated ones… And of course I’m not talking about some ritualistic hjwdsjb, but something to be gained in ways I can’t explain, something which has to do with our bio-neurological uniqueness…
And I’ve slipped over into my 👾👽 language, isn’t it?
Told you 🙂
But that’s about it, before I completely lose the plot 😉
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I’ll fall back on my module in psychoanalytical approaches to Literature many moons ago😄
I suppose from my point of view, I see it as actually having a broader access to “there”, and perhaps a shorter distance to travel. When I have the space and time, accessing how things affect me across the full spectrum of my senses, and putting that into words, is logical. I don’t experience the world in isolation, I experience it as a full onslaught of sensory information. Which has its highs and lows 🙂
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That’s exactly what doesn’t seem to be working for me…
Even though I experience the world as an “onslaught of information” too, how these have an affect is still my greatest dilemma, because while I can’t express these ‘feelings’ other than through various degrees of meltdowns, or anger fuelled diatribes, forms of expression clearly influenced by these emerge less belligerently from ‘there’, but in forms hardly understood by anyone…
And yes, it’s exactly what psychoanalysis only seems to have some understanding about, when catching relevant thoughts emerging in a conversation, completely irrelevant to the subject, but revealing to the therapist.
I my poetry though, it’s like writing at the crossroad of the subject’s and therapist’s thought flow…
I’m really sorry to bother you with these, but that’s where my autism comes really through…
It’s my reply I gave my assessing clinician when she asked, “what’s your hobbi?”, “My mind” I said, to which she asked again, “yes, but I mean your hobbi hobbi?”, and the only sincere answer was again, “my mind”… 👾
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Perhaps moving the focus from “being understood” to “opening the door” could be a first step.
Much of my writing is not written to be understood. It’s for me to let things out (I’m thinking more of the many things I don’t share, than the things I do). Poetry is such a funny thing. It either reaches you or it doesn’t. Some things reach me on a conscious level, and I love their intellectualism; others reach me on an emotional level, and I long ago decided that I don’t need to understand something to find it beautiful.
Don’t worry about bothering me. I like to bounce ideas around. Even when there’s no conclusion (or maybe especially when there’s no conclusion)
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“Much of my writing is not written to be understood”
Same here, same here…
Nevertheless, since what I write sometimes gets out through the open door, I still have to witness the consequences, and it’s those I find less than understandable, since my mind constantly looks for logic and rationale, even when others are reading my thoughts…
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Too true… one becomes a “channel of” and for ” poetry expressing itself from some other -dimensional plane of one’s existence etc” thank you Rhi and Moshe Ben Yehuda .
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The honour’s truly mine 😇
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Guess what, I watched 🥇🥇🥇
Now I’ll need a couple of days to narrow down my thoughts to comprehensible words, and be able to write them 🙂
If I’ll attempt now, most of what I’d write would be chaotically confused, hardly understandable…
🙂
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I look forward to hearing your thoughts 🙂
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