"Final" draft of disability poems
When I took The Rhetoric of Access Class in the Summer of 2006, Dr Salvo kept asking me why I could theorize all sorts of things, but couldn't theorize my own disability. Or even seem to conceptualize it in any meaningful way. While I had come to terms with the necessity of the label "disabled" for university purposes, I didn't like to use it except as shorthand for my situation--which, as a Burkeian, I should have realized the implications of this naming, but, then again, I wasn't theorizing it. I struggled to define for myself whether the disability was part of me, or if there was some other core identity outside the illness. As though the illness were a deviation from my True Self.
"You don't let it define you," Lou said today, as I struggled to finish the prose poem. And this is and was and probably always will be the problem. It does define me, but not in totality; it is me, I am it. It colors my language, my bodily movements, my lived experience. It gives me, in Burke's words, an orientation or perspective that prescribes strategies for living. But people, particularly normals, don't want to think about this, because admitting the sickness is (in) you is to admit your proximity to death. We run far, far away from death, if only to return to it in the death drive. Being disabled means being mortal. And that makes people uncomfortable.
Well too damn bad, people. As Mrs Curie told me when I struggled with Weber's Clarinet Concerto, "Make beautiful mistakes"--or, in another orientation, make the mistakes beautiful. Here's me trying to make the mistake of my body beautiful. (Oh, and Jeff, if you're reading this? Thanks, and sorry about the Muppet comparison. And to AHS band members: Yes, I'm aware I was never "cricked." But there was that one time with Kamp's pants, and you know we came close then...)
Twelve Steps Away From Disabled
He wants me to walk like a penguin; I want him to speak to me like an adult. My feet turn ninety degrees without my permission and I waddle triumphantly across the office. No, he says, not looking at my mother. I meant, turn them the other way. My toes face each other and twitch hello.
In the middle of a step, time stops with a high whine, bright and still like a frozen sunbeam. My boot slides in the snow banks; the New Hampshire sludge has a contract out on me. The rest of the class keeps on walking. Thanks, teacher, for leaving me be--I‘ll catch up eventually.
If I don't run now, I might be able to walk later: this is energy conservation in its finest. The gym teacher is unimpressed by my planning skills. He thinks I mean later in the day. I mean later, when I'm middle-aged and sporting a wheelchair. I've got a lot of contingencies to consider. I'm already eight.
My fingers fly up and down the keys, faster than anyone, and my mother looks relieved. Somehow my body knows this, easier than walking, than using a knife and fork, and I wonder if this is what it's like to walk without thinking left, right, lift, push. The concentration of a step is harder than Mozart's clarinet concerto in A.
And hit. Three feet behind again, panting and red faced; my foot is nowhere near the white line--it’s betrayed me again. The bass drum pounds on, and they threaten to throw me in the creek. The doctor’s note stays in my back pocket. I’ll take the plunge instead.
Trudging uphill. The cold feel of frozen meat that is my thigh trips me, breaking the article already written in my head. I can't ask the question I want to (Do you agree with the Senate's decision?) with the noise of pain coating the scene. I go for the easy schmooze instead, and Mom recommends I rethink journalism school. We call the new round of college applications "Plan B."
The word is washing machine, but I'm going with "the thing that gets things clean," which earns me laughter and friends. I smooth over the gaps by speeding in circles around missing words, so it's okay, and no one notices until I try to order pizza and ask for balloons instead. Much giggling ensues. Instant friends for life.
I didn't mean to hit her, but she was sitting too close, and the arm decided it needed to inhabit some other space, so I'm telling myself it's not my fault. When the leg kicks me back from my desk and into the wall three days later, Jeff’s mentoring skills kick in, and he eases my blush with jokes about the spontaneous overflow of emotions. I tell him I hate the Romantics, anyway. I score points for intertextuality.
Jeff’s a mad Muppet-like man, bobbing in his seat, Mennonite compassion oozing from the books on his shelf. You’ve got more options, he tells me. You’d like grad school, because it’s clear Plan B is a bust, and I don’t want to travel too far into the alphabet. I refuse to ask What if I run out of words? What if I get lost? because Jeff has too much faith in me, and I’d hate to ruin his day.
They put me on the top floor, of course, high above the city that breathes for me most days. Fire drills aside, the minuscule elevator carries me faithfully down to the pavement I can pound, inhaling Boston, infusing it in my skin. The stairs stare me down, and I glare right back; I am not lost, for once, in the streets that wind dizzyingly in marshes and fens.
To the prim professor, I say, “The creation of audience identification is necessarily voluntary: But what if they don’t want to feel disabled with me?” The words haven’t gone anywhere, as long as the buildings twinkle at night, and standing in the doorway between here and there seems to suit me.
I'm sitting in the driveway, trying to remember which one is the brake pedal again, and how to get home. Twenty years of failing to be the right kind of penguin has been like the slide of twilight into night. Or like a frog being boiled slowly in water. “Becoming,” I say to the unfamiliar street signs, “is different from being,” tasting Heidegger on my lips. As long as I’m still driving, I haven’t yet arrived.
Sirloin Or why you shouldn't hug me
Please unloose my flesh
To let fly free that which
Aches against my borders.
Like frost on a window
Binds sticky and prickles,
So do your fingers scratch
Against the edge of my skin.
It begins in the spine,
Tracks down and settles
Matching gut for gut,
Meeting stab with stab,
Etching rutted lines
Through pulsing muscle,
Clean Ginsu marks,
But not to stretch,
Not to butterfly open:
It’s not your intent to butcher
Me with embracing arms.
And a bonus poem that I didn't have the balls to read at something called "Disability Awareness Month." "Raising Awareness" is an idea I often rant against, and this poem is to be read sarcastically: Imagine a whiny 13 year old girl's voice, and you've got it just about right. (Yes, this and Sirloin are reposts, but with revisions)
Raising Awareness
Are you there, passion?
Are you yet asleep?
Has hope awoken you on cue
at the end of the end,
where you can sip the most fuel
thrust forward at the tip of the fuse?
Or have you slipped beyond now
infusing the realm of dreams
where you are more easily grasped
where you are not denied a chance
to light the plot to enlighten the world
And make them all impassioned for the cause?
They’ve waited, passion,
those banner-makers and slogan-writers
They who walk for cures with posters held high
They’ve waited on you and upon you
waited for your arrival at the darkest night
triumphant in trumpet blares at blastissimo,
For you to burn the untouched souls
And inflame them with compassion.
But you snuck in quiet to the back room
and tied them up in our own pink ribbons
till they are furiously still at the keyboard
passionately aware, the standard of awareness raised.
Are you still here, passion,
Now that the worst has floated downriver?
It seems they can't remember
how this is supposed to end--
is it a tragedy or comedy?
A romantic gesture?
A single rose on the fifteenth of February?
