Black air and seven seas all rotten through

There was something I was going to say, sorry, lost my voice there for a while. Mistrust my voice now. The voice is the voice of the mask. You can hear it in the words, the tone. The mask is friendly, but authoritative. That’s our fear now. Writing leads to the voice which leads to the mask.

But yet we write. Hour upon hour, word after word stitched together on homespun cloth. We cry and we bleed and we write, always we write. We would deny to the stars that we would call ourselves a writer, yet that’s all we do, sit and write. Might as well stop breathing than stop writing.

So to the world there is silence, but to myself there is constant chatter, a series of strings that eventually end up repeating themselves. When I go to share, the voice rears its head, requires subversive methods to circumvent, a conscious effort to learn to speak anew, forgive the gibberish spilling from my mouth, I just ate.

When people started sharing their lives online, I got all excited and wanted to participate but as usual I got it all turned upside down. The point is to share the life you have, but I was denied a life by own hand. I hoped by sharing I could have the cool hip life everyone else had but then the autistic in me recoils at the innate hypocrisy. We’re monotropic folk, there’s no room in here to try to cram two opposite ideas in one box. I can’t even handle the TV and the stereo playing at the same time.

But still, the desire to share lingers. But I need to be honest about my life. I need to be honest with myself, need to be honest with my voice. There’s something more. Something happened. Lightning struck, the world was forever changed. My eyes were opened to the truth, and now I can’t see differently. There’s a story here to tell.

And I think I need to tell it, because there are others, others like me, blind men convinced they could actually see if they tried harder, people who are actually wolves and they don’t even know it, or what’s worse they do but don’t understand what a gift they’ve been handed. I have been handed one, the quantum universe unfolding as it should, and it is right and holy that I share with others in need.

But it’s going to be hard. Difficult to communicate when you’re shifting modes to confuse the editor, throw the voice off the track. I was a fair to middlin' poet, nothing to write home about, but that’s the voice that I need now, not the cock sure showman who’s going to woo you with wordsmansmith. The autistic brain is going to speak this time, thank you very much, and you know that everything good I’ve ever written has sprung from that well, unbidden, words formed before the pen hits the page, step up to the mike, Peter, and give it a try. You have something to say. Let’s hear it.