Cento for Autistic Poets Whose Words Offer a Map of Possibility When My Words Are Lost
I wish I could write poems where the poem’s alive marched,
hands in the dirt, head in the sun –
Listen, a godsong is in the bees.
Each seed is a portal the shape of your before and after.
Invariably, the sun invades:
there’s cause and effect and there’s a simple
lusting real ludicrous idea
that there is only one ideal way to be which we should all strive for.
They say each poem’s an engine w/ an animal heart.
Wholed by a light at the snuff of your day,
autistic. Please love poets we are the first
who do not yield to their authority.
What is the meaning of a mountain of masks?
Any other face is fed to the waves that brought you.
This poem is made of lines borrowed from (in order of appearance): Jane Shi, J.D. Harlock, Jaia Hamid Bashir, Shel Moring, DJ Savarese, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Adam Wolfond, Troels Steenholdt Heiredal, torrin a. greathouse, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Hannah Emerson, Tiezst Taylor, Lauren Russell, and Leslie McIntosh.
Derek Yen writes code in the mornings and everything else in the evenings. He keeps returning to ideas of illness, technology, and speculative imagination. His writings have been published in Seventh Wave, Lucky Jefferson, A Velvet Giant, and No, Dear. He shares an apartment in Brooklyn with his partner, their dog, and several houseplants. Find him on Instagram @derekiswriting.
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