Autism
       

Some nights I catch the smell
                          of the lives of others,
all that is awry, agley,
                          the washers loose,
the springs rust-bunged.
                          Or the sheerest glee
I hope and fear that friends may feel:
                          their refound wallet
or the cat returned after a week
                          and just a little thin.
And when I say I smell this, I am
                          talking creosote,
broth smog, thinners. The room hangs
                          round the smell,
would bow to its bidding or bawl
                          at its funeral.
I strain to enter the life of another,
                          to bathe them, taunt them,
treat. For people mainly think they only
                          think they think that
no one thinks like them. But I too
                          have met against
your tarriest thought, your sick ambition,
                          lay late with a knife
in my mind, or a pulse of appalling glory.
                          We are alike as mercury
and nickel are, as leopard and gazelle
                          might blink in unison.
Even my siblings are disarmingly other.
                          And as a man walking
through all hours of darkness, clearing
                          to clearing, stile to well
to glebe to turnpike, I catch a gamey taint
                          of other beings, softly
being, grinding in foliage, cowering in boles,
                          zedding to warrens.
Paralleling you in bed, I give marginally less
                          of myself when sleep
grips its pliers. No one has ever known me.
                          Is that cute? I hear a woman
say, 'I died that night.' A man in the audience
                          shouts out in the quiet part
of the play. Some self-styled prophet screams,
                          full minute, on the beach
and all the poppers scatter from the sea,
                          gapey-eyed and clinging
at Mummy. I count these sifting colours
                          of my brief spectrum,
halfwise touching each in turn. You should
                          believe me when I say
that what I am seeing now is something
                          you must never see.

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Copyright © 2018 Roddy Lumsden All rights reserved
from So Glad I'm Me
Bloodaxe Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission