Overload

I am basically overloaded lately. I can’t get through the evening without an anxiety attack that is crippling. It builds all day. So much light and color and things to do. I’m at the doctor now.

UPDATE

I had a full blown panic attack at the doctor’s office. They put me on oxygen and gave me an injection of something.

Something has me wound so tight. Meds maybe. Or just sensory overload, Asperger’s style. But I have anxiety every day. The doctor gave me a new prescription to take as well. He isn’t my psych, but he took care of things, which I needed.

Just praying for calm soon, and that the medicine will alleviate the problem when I need it to. Klonopin is a huge help, but by law quantities are limited. Lately the anxiety has been more than I can cover with my allotted Klonopin.

Justice

Justice is a poor best friend,
Sticking knives in me
Where I can see them.

I reach for the cookie
He slaps me gently
I smell the desiccated marsh

He holds my hand on rollercoasters.
It wouldn’t be fair
For me to die when I
Have been so innocuous

But the tide looked
Innocuous and the
Fish is dead.

I am not a reed in the marsh.

When he takes me home
He always takes the
Long route

Adam

Help the baby in cashmere
This is a heinous place
To be born.

I have been in the spider’s
Web a long time,
Most of me liquified.

Most.

She keeps a little of
Me alive
For amusement

There are bitter stones
Everywhere
With no water to
Wear them away

Find a garden somewhere
Lay him down beside the bees
Name him Adam.

Choices

Piquant wood shavings

build houses from one another.

Natural selection,

the choices of the man in the barn with his saw.

The light chooses not to touch those with old tongues any longer.

If I went to the light, I would find a locket of gold.

Choices are envious of boxes. To make a choice is to sew yourself to something that runs faster than you can.

When choices are all spooled out and the thread is cut, what remains is a saw and a veil of night.

Prose Poem

The well-off at the ossified marina count the crusty salt crystals. Orange corn poking from the windows of my old home dare me to grind my teeth on it. At the mouth of the bay of wine, bad memories teeter. The division between food and teeth is stark. The division of drink and thought soft. She strays from the wine to my old house and its belligerent farm.

Rough draft

Major Overshares – Aspie Style

I am (despite my longing for a solitary house with a gun rack by the door and a no trespassing sign) friendly. I am also an Aspie. I sometimes have fewer boundaries than other people.

Recently I was passing through the gate to get home and I had some big bags of candy I had just bought on the front. I bought them because I was manic. I don’t normally spend 16 dollars on candy. The gate guard noticed, and I almost said, “I’m manic!”

Quickly, in the back of my mind, I thought, “Don’t tell him something so personal.”

So I yelled, “It’s my time of the month!”

I am always like that. I get up to a register and the tired, fed up woman behind it says, “How are you today?”

Then I proceed to tell her. “I have a headache, but I am really hoping to relax on the porch swing today. My bad ankle hurts and my meds aren’t working. But I am watching a marathon of Toddlers and Tiaras!”

No one is prepared for that.

I don’t have the filter in my mouth that I would be more likely to have if I was neurotypical. Sometimes it is fun. People probably think I’m nuts, but they warm up to me and I can be really good at fostering relationships that are open and honest. Other times it throws people for a loop and they run away. I try to turn off the Asperger’s part of myself, but it’s hard.

The Wrens

Banished to the well, the little boat that steered itself.

No strength welcome here in the miserly home of wrens.

Shoe laces control a careful electricity.

Wrens like knives, ask toddlers to carry them.

Glad Gloria had the boat. Now she has her name changed. She will never be 3.

The wrens eat well, don’t share with one another.