You’re here because one day a long time ago I posted a poem on the internet.
That’s weird, but probably mostly true. 3000+ poems, 4,000+ haiku, however many thousand photographs, essays, videos, and stories later, some of you are still here. Wild, this.
It’s the poetry then, I wanted to revisit today, to share more of. Thought I could share one that I don’t know if many people have read, unless they purchased my latest book, The Never Was. Which, if you haven’t and want to, click the link below and it shall be so.
Maybe, thought I, people like hearing the behind-the-scenes stories about how poems came to be what they came to be. The stories behind them, the inspiration. Maybe, they’d want to dive a little deeper.
Maybe this is what might entice some people to truly join this family and help keep this place alive. Maybe this is a perk that I could offer to the paid community. Not necessarily more content, but more connection. The live gatherings are doing this, this community is doing this, so why not try?
Here is the poem, and below it, the stories behind it, and the spoken word recording of me reading it, so you can hear how my brain heard it the moment it fell out of my mind.
I often wonder about my silly mind. About being on the Autism spectrum, about my place in it. Saw they just replaced the official symbol for Autism too, saw they went from puzzle piece to an infinity sign made of rainbow.
Color, I think they aimed at, the idea of the wide spectrum of color that all eyes see differently. What then, if you see yourself as something else? What does it say if the middle of you feels different?
I love you all.
Be good.
Your poem is lovely, and the question posed within is inviting: “Is darkness a color?”
The color of darkness. The splendor of absence. The harmony of silence. We all pass these things with little notice; thank goodness, after all, for the loud and bright shiny distractions that capture our attention. Yet they remain. We instinctively know that exploring the banal is good for us—it recalibrates our sight and resets our emotions, providing the very baseline for appreciating life's diversity. In a world of memes and algorithms, empty space serves as a necessary intermission, a quiet room where the mind can find rest. By looking closer at what is typically ignored, we, as writers, discover that when the heavy cover of the obvious is lifted, nothingness carries its own weight, and silence can be heard quite clearly…dictating our very first words.