I am being suffocated by pain
That demands to be felt
But refuses to acknowledge its origin or cause.
How do I tame a beast
Whose name I do not know?
This season always brings with it emotional turmoil,
The joys of daylight's manipulation of bipolar disorder,
But this creature that weighs down my chest
Has not uttered its name.
Like all demons,
It must be named to be exorcised,
And it will not be cowed by my speaking in tongues.
Back ye foul beast
From whence you came.
By hook or crook
I will learn your name.

Night falls like a heavy blanket
As the smell of rain wafts off the pavement,
Wheels of my father’s truck carrying us homeward.
The mountains stand like shadowed specters,
Black against a cloud covered sky,
Moon too shy to peak out from behind
The curtains of leftover moisture.
I hum a choked-up rendition of
Stairway to Heaven that plays across the radio waves.
Tonight, we are driving home from celebrating my grandmother’s
90th birthday.
My soul aches with the joy of sharing this occasion with her
And the sadness of watching as age catches her in life’s race.
I count my blessings that I have been gifted this moment,
For one never knows how many lie around the corner.
She is the most amazing person I’ve had the opportunity to meet.
If I could be granted the rest of my life be spent in her company,
It would still be too short.
Love reminds me that sometimes the best things in life
Are the ones that hurt the most to lose,
Yet I would not trade a moment’s loving her
For an ounce less pain.
It is worth it to love her so completely
For as long as time will let me.

Do not conflate mortality and morality.
You can die a sinner,
Or you can die a saint,
But we all die just the same.

At 7 years old, I told my mother,
"You're not my real mom.
You're my Earth mom,
And at night when I'm asleep,
I go back to my home planet."
As the years sped onwards,
I conceptualized myself as a three headed alien,
A Poet From Another Planet,
Acutely aware of my innate differences.
No explanation had I other than being extraterrestrial.
Those around me, too, seemed to sense I was "other."
Playground insults supported by adults who floated labels like
"Lazy," "Difficult," "Rude," "Deliberately Obtuse"
Over my head as if they were a crown,
Signifying I was queen of kingdom "Unlike Us."
No one looked deeper at the poor social skills ,
The rigidity, sensory difficulties, challenges with executive dysfunction.
It was easier to pretend I was in control,
Choosing the route of difficulty and belittlement.
It was only after I nearly succeeded in killing myself
That someone assembled the whole picture.
My story is not unique among women
Born into bodies and brains whose operating system is Autism.
We are the forgotten, the alienated, and plastered with assumptions,
Lost under the blind eye of those who spin tall tales of
"Only straight, white little boys can possibly be autistic!"
Generations of autistic women have known not a name for their difference,
Bogged down under self-loathing, eating disorders, and suicides,
Anything to cope with a world designed to break them
For the differences everyone noticed but no one could see.
Now that women are finally coming onto the scene,
A subtle shift in the awareness that the clinicians, teachers, doctors
Were missing a whole population of autistic people,
Answers are gate kept behind assessments that are thousands of dollars
And diagnosticians who've yet to see the error of their ways.
Peace of mind seems to be a right only of white autistic men
Who are lucky enough to have the "profile" of autism modeled after them.
It took 19 years, two suicide attempts, including 10 days in a coma
For someone to finally "see me,"
And I'm one of the lucky ones.
Answers were finally mine,
But understanding one's own brain should be a human right.
I think we can all agree:
The price of a diagnosis should not be your life.

The neighbors seem so vivacious
As they mull about outside my window,
Sun kissing their skin.
The mothers cling to their children,
And sweat clings to the aching muscles of workers
As they bustle,
Hustling mattresses out of the house
And building supplies in.
We exchange cautious smiles
As I sit here in the staleness of my room,
The monotony of this routine.
They are so alive.
I wish I was too.

My soul is afraid
Of when love used to be dangerous,
When home was not synonymous with protection,
And when I wasn't safe
Even from myself.
Memories contuse my heart
And leave bitter embers on my brain.
I wonder when I will be able to let go
Of a past that should not hold so much power
Over a future I've worked so hard for.

Academic conversations about consent are a pure form of agony,
Listening to students and Professor toss around the word like it's a hypothetical commodity,
As if there is question that autonomy and dignity belong to every living thing in that room.
We are asked to dissect the most intimate of physical safeties as if this is a lesson in biology,
Solve 'consent' like a particularly challenging calculus problem,
Pretend as if this didn't happen in the confines of my body.
It's excruciating to have to take an equation,
We'll start with y=mx+b,
And calculate which variables determine basic human decency.
I was young, female, gay, autistic, bipolar,
Clinging to his professions of love like they could stitch the gaping emotional wounds,
And somehow that didn't make me human when he did the math.
I don't know how to argue, Professor, with which philosophical tools,
Professor, that I was a person, Professor,
When he decided to **** me.