=The Aspergers Sonnets=

10.

I have no language but the one I never had.

The silent one

that betrayed me

before I ever said a single word.

I took a pseudonym and walked into exile

like a mechanism anticipating collision.

But I was already in too many fragments

ever to be broken.

I was indifferent to my own loneliness.

To communicate, I took the panic needle

and suddenly there were organisms

on the moon. My shadow

was cut. I bled
syllables I could almost hear.

11.

Could I have been born poisoned?

The needle withdrew from me

something essential.

I was betrayed

but by whom? Everyone I cared about

had departed before I was born.

When I looked in my bedroom

it was devastation that had slept there

the night before. The name

on my birth certificate

was a pseudonym. Somewhere, on me,

there was a fatal cut. It horrified me

to discover that I was a mechanism

for spewing organisms.

12.
I felt as if I were the moon’s child

with a language all my own.

Panic was my shadow. I conferred

with her often. I took for granted something inside

me had departed but maybe

it had never arrived.  The world around me

was cracked and the organisms

maintained their indifference. I had braced myself

for a collision with a mechanism I

couldn’t imagine. I picked up my loneliness

in fragments and searched for a crack

in my exile. Everywhere I looked

there was devastation

but no memory of the comet at all.