Being disabled is to be always living in a peripheral state. Those who don’t experience this don’t know how unfair and unstable crippled life really is. In order to mask this the non-disabled say that access is coming “tomorrow.”
So I sing “tomorrow tomorrow the accommodations will come out tomorrow” and wait for Daddy Ableist Warbucks to come.
If you’re a disabled person you know the drill.
How my eyes ache!
I’ve been crossing streets
With my trained dog
Shadows, lethal,
Aim for my torso
Power in circulation
Henry Ford
My private enemy
Home again
And safe
I fall asleep
On the sofa
Dreaming
Of the little girl
Who was beside me
In the infant hospital
All those years ago
Blind children
Side by side
Her singing
This is how all stories go
In the kingdom of frost
Cold abandons itself
In the streaming silence
The unsaid runs away
But its the return
That interests me
Laughing
At the wrong places
The turning
Screaming
At the compass
Parsifal
Reacquainting
With his hands
“Look at my throat” said the midday sun
And chickadees, titmice, cardinals
I asked them: “where will I be buried?”
It was April, suddenly warm—
Sad child, me, looking for something else
The milk and gin of Percy
“I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar…”
Here I remember that boy
His guitar…
“they say I'm alienated from reality
as if I had the power to decide life”
—Sanni Purhonen
They say I’m blind and should trade my eyes
For jellyfish—or just be a coral in darkness
They say I’m nothing more than the wind enraged
For cover, in polite society they say I’m like them
But they don’t invite me to the grand reunion
They say its written someplace I’m the match end
When I was a small I carried
A dead pocket watch
I thought how one day I’d have a clean reality
They say I’m a dry season
They change their minds: I’m a rumor of tears
They talk like men drunk on silver
They say I’m a poor infinity
I’m not afraid of anything
Conventional children called me “blindo”
Of course they also threw dirt
I liked the dirt, it smelled like the hands of the moon
I pressed my face into tulips
Built a summer house
Out of shells
Saved the seeds of apples
In my blindo pockets
Angels went on flying
In twilight
Without wings
As they always do
“I used to be purple but now I am pink,” wrote Kenneth Koch. I used to be a disabled child but now I am a disabled man. I’ve yet to achieve pink. I guess you could say my insides are like a sea wall covered with spiny anemones. I climb it. It’s just behind my face. Somehow I never get stung.
Either/or I am darkness descending
Or giving way
So morning is clear
Today, just a man
Walking with shadows in him
And no one knows how it will be
Or if our five senses
Will ever rise
The skin of the onion is the measure of his glory. But his skin is imperfect, a humiliation, a hundred layers of anguish. The onion is a kind of library, an archive of failures. Explore. Peel away the layers. See Aristotle waving five roses at sunrise. See Cain who goes on killing Abel. See Algebra. See the coins of Silesius. Damned if you can’t see everything. This is a sufficient way of knowing, immortal. Say whatever you want.
I try to believe I’m not afraid of anything, I’m making peace
with
ghosts all the time
—Sanni Purhonen
schoolteacher ghost
you didn’t like me
that is, the school room was a box
of hot indignities
a kind of pornography, really
making the blind child recite
handwriting on walls
I suppose you thought it was fun
we all know intelligence
provides the exact names of things
today I can tell you
there’s an exact moment
when everyone goes ahead
without sight
I agree with Lorca, two has never been a number
But merely anguish and sorrow
**
Let the mathematicians eat in darkened rooms
Weeping into their soup
Yes I think that’s right
**
If I go on in this way I’ll birth a goddess from my forehead
And she’ll be a real bitch
**
I agree also with Lorca that the dead spend their time
Gobbling up their own hands
**
Yes that was me—picking mushrooms
Singing songs by Blake
**
“How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own little boat.”
Excerpt From
Kabir
Robert Bly
**
I like my mistakes more than my triumphs
They’re loyal
**
Right down to DNA
Ice is my country
**
I love it when Lorca says
This is not death, it is a fruit stand
Planet of the Blind 