Art + Medicine

(calm music) - Heaven is all goodbyes, but I hope it's soft.

Softness of skin, softness of thought.

Call me soft and I'll send you a heart.

Won't do fisticuffs, just brisket cuts.

When people called me soft, I found I'd be ashamed.

Now I call myself soft, to rebuke that disdain.

Autistic, sensitive to everything.

Autistic, we don't speak the same.

Autistic, in every poem I sing.

Autistic, in every song I cry.

Using tears to wipe ink smudge from my pants cuffs.

Drowning in words, living for life.

Heard it once told that life is wasted on the living.

And death isn't something we should dwell on.

All I know for certain is life exists on the fence between hope and hopelessness.

It's like a seesaw, being Autistic, swinging from joy to a meltdown.

Sensory overwhelm, need something soft to calm me down.

The good Lord blessed me with soft skin.

So, I caress myself for comforting.

My masseuse, 20 years in the game, once said, I had the softest skin.

The softest skin she'd ever felt.

Like velvet, like felt.

I took the compliment.

But deep down, I knew Autism was to thank.

Autism and Allah.

One of the primary features of EDS, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, is velvet soft skin.

EDS is associated with ASD.

I hate how white people attach syndrome or disorder to everything they don't understand, and I hate how negative connotations are attached to those attachments.

Which perhaps explains the negative connotations I attach to my-same- self-said-Said-Saciid-name.

What's a shorter word for connotation?

How about, bro pass me the cream cheese and a light.

Pass me the hookah and a sprite.

Pass me fatty food and bring to stummy great delight.

Better yet, pass me a prescription for my ADHD.

So I don't have to self-medicate just to get through life.

And if you can spare it, pass me that peace of mind.

Right behind two lost lovers stuck between time.

And the metronome which hangs over us all.

Ticking, tocking, clicking, clocking.

Bombs over Baghdad, bombs over Baidabo.

Bombs over Kyiv, bombs over Kurdish Peshmerga.

Young (beep), ever a learner.

Never have I clutched a burner.

That's a lie, but I was born in the land where AKs are cheaper than grains of sand.

And sand is all we understand.

The sun is all we have.

The Blackness of our skin, protecting us from it.

White people colonized Africa but 400 years after the Dutch erected limp castles on our land, their descendants' skin still peels off in the sun.

They can't even protect skin from sun, yet we're the inferior ones?

Anyway.

None of that matters anyway.

I just pray I get to see heaven one day.

Wish heaven on earth for all my people.

Wish heaven was easier to get into.

But as the Prophet Peace Be Upon Him once said, the road to heaven is paved with hardship, the road to hell paved with ease.

So if this life is any testament, heaven just may be in our future.

At least we hope.

And hope is all I have these days, when nights turn to day, turn to nights again.

When the blood moon serenades my waking dreams.

When Larry Levis' ghost writes living poems in Fresno, Modesto, San Diego.

Takes the form of dirt devils, sand tornados, uses wind to carve poems about nothing into still more nothing.

Migrant farmers step over stillborn poems as they pluck fruit destined to be tossed from suburban fridges.

I got cousins back home who've never seen strawberries or fridges.

I don't know what that means, but I should probably cherish something.

At least while I still can.

Lord knows they could be on their way.

Shoot, I think they knocking on my door right now.

No knock raid.

Ain't that how the last brother got tased?

I mean shot.

Shoot, I mistook their guns for tasers.

Ain't that what they said about the brother they killed before him?

He was shot, a nine millimeter Glock taser?

This is Minnesota, bro.

All we export is frigid ice and police lies.

Murder too, tho.

We export a lot of murder here.

Shoot, am I next?

I wonder what lie they'll export about my murder, about my death.

I pray I'm not next.

And every one of my brothers prays he's not next.

In a country that values our bodies only in death.

Where we know every traffic stop could be our death.

In the land of never quite making rent.

Hmm, this place is hell.

But is that such a bad thing?

Hell is hard and hardship leads to heaven.

And heaven is all we have to keep us going.

Heaven is all goodbyes, but I hope it's soft.

I hope heaven is softer than this life.

And I hope I see you on the other side.

(cheerful music) - [Announcer] This program was produced in collaboration with the Center for the Art of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

And funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(calm music)