The St. Louis Star And Times, Missouri, November 4, 1910

- Silas Denver Melvin @sweatermuppet, Grit Poetry Collection

附近30 Nearby30

Translation: Guandi Wu

Proofreading: Amir Hampel

─ Hisham Siddiqi

i keep thinking about how rfk said that autistic people "will never write a poem." i keep thinking about that, about if humanity is calculated on the back of old verse. how far we measure personhood is in baseball and stanza breaks.

i keep thinking - i have over 7k poems on here alone. language can be a special interest, after all. did you know the word autism comes almost direct from the greek word autos, meaning "self"? self-ism.

maybe he is right - i haven't really played baseball. i was a ballet dancer instead. and besides - my sister once accidentally hit me in the face with an aluminum bat. i'm not sure if the injury gives me half points. am i only a person in the dugout? hand in a mitt? swinging?

does softball count? does cricket? am i a person if i throw the ball to my dog. am i a person as long as the ball is in the air, or do i stop being a person as it rolls into the bushes. i took my girlfriend to fenway recently; was i a person in the sun, with my hands up, with the game laid out at my feet in a diamond. i felt like a person, but that was back in the summer, and i often feel my most person-like then.

am i more of a person because of the sheer number of things i've written? does quality matter, or is it quantity? i used to write entire books every summer in high school - i wasn't doing well. i felt the least like-a-person back then. but then - does any person feel human in high school?

in the library, ink on my skin, i feel personhood shutter at the edges of myself. actually, writing feels blissfully like not being myself. it feels birdlike; escaping into creation so my body dissolves and i survive only by muscle memory. i am not there, i am writing.

but who can deny the falconlike focus of warsan shire, the tenderness of mary oliver, the sheer skill of amanda gorman. those are poets. they are certainly human. you could line them up with the way their words have influenced us and measure their literary shadows like wings.

perhaps it was very assumptive of me to want to be a poet rather than "a [ label ] poet." i wanted the work to fill itself in, rather than be stained by what i am. i do not write in despite of my neurodivergence, i am just neurodivergent and writing.

does the poem have to be in english or can i send it through my palms into the coat of my dog. does the poem have to make sense. does the poem have to love you back.

if i break a glass, will the poem appear naturally? or is the act of breaking the glass human-enough. the shards of my life glittering out beneath me - do i have to write the poem, or is it self-evident in the pile of glass splinters? i cannot grasp this world the way other people can. regardless, i endeavor to touch - even the mess - very gently.

i broke my toenail against my coffee table recently. i released a bug outdoors. i made coffee. i walked my dog.

i didn't write a poem about any of these things.

something else, then. existing without humanity.

how am i meant to show my love when i peel an orange but need a shovel to give you a slice

“Keep fighting.

“I know you’re bruised and battered and bloody. I know you’ve been fighting for too long. I know you’re hopeless and broken and so, so tired. But you have to keep fighting. If you don’t, there’s nobody left. All this, everything you were fighting for in the first place, it’s all gone. You’re the only one left, and I’m sorry that you have to do this. I know how much you want to just surrender to that awful, bone-deep exhaustion that’s making it hard to even breathe, let alone move. But if you don’t keep fighting, you’ll die, and everyone else will die with you.

“Get up. You can’t surrender. You can’t yield.

“Get up. You can’t lose hope. Remember their faces, the ones that you’re fighting for. Remember the things you’re protecting. Remember everything you have to loose.

“Get up. Grab your weapon. You’re not dying like this.

“If we go down, we go down swinging, remember? That’s what you always said. You have to stay determined. You were always so stubborn, so where’s all that stubbornness now? Find it. You have to find it.

“If you have to die, you’re dying on your feet. You’re taking them all down with you.

“If you’re going to hell, then you’re going to fight it every step of the way. Yell and struggle and make it as hard for them as possible. Kill the goddamn devil if you have to.

“Get up. You’re not done here.

“Get up.

“…

“…Please.

“Please, get up.

“I’m begging you. Get up. Keep fighting. Please.

“You can’t die like this.”

idk who needs to hear this rn but suffering is not noble. take the tylenol