Echoed at 3 and 24

My niece has been

echoing and copying

everything lately. She copies

words from

upset teens on TV-

"My life, my family no

one cares about my life!"-

when she is

upset and

Bounces across the room

in joy joy joy

with words from

Lilo and Stitch on her lips.

But she's 3, and

so it's normal for her

at that age to echo

echo echo echo

words.

I can't find the words

to say everything and

so I send her, him copied words

of my self

doubt- "Fast as You Can

run free yourself from me"-

and cite, cite, recite the words

from songs

saying I

Love "Something", "I Want

You, you so bad"

bubbling the beatles and

Fiona and Adele and raging

Rise Against As I

"Pulled on these

bootstraps so hard

that they broke." at

24, it's a pathology.

________

Written in Response to Julia's blog post, Metaphors Are Important: An Ethnography Of Robotics, as a comment. The following songs are echo'd in this: Fast As You Can by Fiona Apple; Something and I Want You (She's So Heavy) by the Beatles; Disparity By Design by Rise against. Links are to Youtube videos with the lyrics on screen.

Wanting

Want and I

know each other intimately

as two lovers.

The days of my childhood

are familiar to her tangles

As the desperation that

melts together hunger and lust

the need of both desire

and survival in a tango of

all the things we'd wished

we had forgotten.

If only Want

was as easy to divorce

as a spouse.

If I could just split down

the middle the cold and

fear and the Heat and joy

that we've shared in the years

of our youth, our pursuit

sometimes foolish and

yet sometimes more of the

order of endurance.

Without her-

Want- there'd be no need

to endure.

I could fade away without

the regrets of giving away

dreams, or the gloom of

hopeless inevitability. I

Know her as a lover in

Sadness and in Dawning

the passion of ambition

and the terror of his words.

(I can't help but

think without her, his words

would have slipped

Aside as water

on oil instead of scarring to

find me wanting.)

Old McDonald (is dead)

I know your name isn't
"McDonald" (My mother says
all she remembers is
"John" and that your
last name was not McD)

but that's what I remember
repeating to myself as
this tiny preschool spinner

when my brother and I sat
in your garage-art-studio

in a summer of early 90s.

I remember you were

towering and you had a beard that

I would call a marker

of a bear in later years

when I would try to trace out

in sculpting emotions in clay and

found objects.

I don't remember meeting you

more than once.

The motorcycle parts that fanned out

like a chart of the

cycles of the moon over

your desk where you sat to

talk payment for

that painting of mother in

neon cups whose

eyes cut flat. The

smell of grease and

the dust thick with oil

never escaped from under my nails.

10 years later I realized "your" scent-shape

formed under my hands as

I crafted a shape of myself

in other people's throw-aways-

how long did you shape my

busy sculpting before

I thought to ask my mother

for your name? Your history?

Your life?

I wish I knew where you are buried.

I wish I could bring you

one of the little things

your scent-shape built in me.

But a child's Old Mcdonald

is dead.

Words that don't need voices

Best experiences of friendship
are ones we build ourselves,
without oversight of
other people’s expectations.

My best moments of friendship
have been the ones that
we each do
our own thing in the room

and on some good thought or idea
imed each other from across
the room and
taken joy from that simpleness

Of communicating in our langauge
instead of “out loud”. typing
words that
don’t need voices

Written for Lydia at AutisticSpeaks.

You write a thousand brilliant

violent words and

your pretty fierce destruction

makes a thousand little movements

around your face

and every lovely frustration

and little pleasant pains

in these words your lyrics

in your little place.

(Those delicate chimes we call your voice

make all the world seem base beside

the way such gentle deep lashings

can break.)

be careful rabid heartsick

power fuelled and

un-alone one who spits out

the words that make me want to bring

you home and I

wish I could be the one

to find your secret places

as I bring you into mine

until I break.

In response to a statement on class privilege that happened to be ableist

[Image is text on a slate: “I do not care what you drive, Where you live. If you know someone who knows someone who knows someone. If your clothes are this years cutting edge. if your trust fund is unlimited. If you are A-list B-list or never heard of you list. I only care about the words that flutter from your mind. Ther are the only thing you truely own. They are the only thing I will remember you by. I will not fall in love with you Bones and Skin. I Will not fall in love with the places you have been. I will not fall in love with anything but the words that flutter from your extraordinary mind.”]

Okay, I get that
You are giving a valuable lesson
about class and love and all that
shit our society builds burdens out of.
I get it, I do.

BUT.

When you reduce people
and what you are able to love to
words “fluttering” out our minds
You are building a system based
on mindless Ableism-
Demonstrating your “able-minded”
Typical processing privilege.

I can never claim to know
where when or how you learned your
words, your language, that which flutters
out your brain into things so easy for a
world in which you are “normal” to Understand
and to get meaning out of.

BUT

That doesn’t mean I can’t tell you
EXACTLY how much bull shit it is
to assume that’s how I or Anyone
else gained language, How we think
how we process our world.

Let me tell you how
when I speak it is with borrowed words
trying to figure out what must be said
to communicate the WORDLESS NESS of
the thoughts and concepts in my mind.

I am not an empty void in here- I have amazing
Twisting, entwining, and vast thoughts which
I may NEVER be able to fully translate into
your “word language.” Years of trying mean
I have images of words trying to dance with
the pure thoughts I have- a brutal habit
that allows me to survive your world
with my apparently non-“extraordinary” mind.

So don’t reduce me, my thoughts, my feelings,
my being into words.

Don’t do it to the
random passer by, don’t do it to the
young man who desperately tries
to make up for translation brain errors
by assuming that gaining xyz will
allow him to pass in a world that
would call his inability to articulate
all his thoughts properly as
Vapid, or as sheep like.

Don’t do it to the girl who can’t speak
at all, and wants the status her lack of words
denies her while she taps at
her Assistive device to let you or her
friend know what she wants in her
coffee order.

Is it wrong to value people based on
class markers? I’ll be the first
to agree with you there in my
woman-formed body and torn
thrift store dress.

But my agreement with that
doesn’t mean I won’t
call you out on your own shit.

Speed Reading

And I'm stuck at this wall

making nothing at all

waiting out this is a cattle call

but I'm doing it

scream as loud as I can

-you're such a sensitive man,

tall, gloried egoless span

when you're screwing me-

Can I pull this apart

without destroying a heart

was I wrong from the start

when I asked that we

Hold on

hold down

the nausea that threatens to over take (it)

Hold on

hold down

and I don't know how much more I can take (of it)

We dance when we walk

and we sing we don't talk

our avoidances stalk

each other out till we

let the dawn wakes

from our glor'ous mistakes

and our tiny earthquakes

of denial and doubt

Gonna tear out my lungs

we're out of ladder rungs

and you're speaking in tongues

and I think that we'll

Hold on

hold down

the nausea that threatens to over take (it)

Hold on

hold down

and I don't know how much more I can take (of it).