A love poem. The call was for a love poem. This was more than ten years ago and I don’t write love poems or, more specifically, poems about lovers. I remember I pulled out a few lines I had written in conjunction with a specific plumbing tool, the name to which had engendered some fascination in me. This was back when I was living in my little row house in a small town in the Netherlands and there were more than enough recurring issues concerning the plumbing to enhance my vocabulary. I thought I could tweak those few lines into some type of fathomable love poem and successfully submit it. I was sadly mistaken. 

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This is an example of my confusion about romantic feelings. In my experience, it’s a struggle to find them and apply them to a scenario in real life with an intention towards a consequence that matches with the expectations of another person. What did I finally say to the realtor? “I want to buy an office.”

“An office?”

“Yes.”

“But you are going to live there?”

“Yes.” 

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And with that conversation I escaped the fatigue of the “little woman what you need is to buy yourself a one bedroom apartment in a nice quiet neighborhood with trendy bars where you can pick up a forty something year old man who is in the initial stages of midlife crisis and take him back home and fuck him and then cook a chicken Au Provence for him in the Ikea oven in a pan that won’t fit into the sink so you can’t wash it properly but you will only try the chicken recipe out once and then give up but one hundred percent no worries about not being given more opportunities to appreciate wildly varying degrees of distracting non-functionality that can surely be yours and surely written into the mortgage, did you want to get an assessment” proposals which were not in line with my version of life, “a small apartment with a big sink in the city center which will offer an easy retreat as well as ideal socialization options for outings to the theater, movies and concerts either alone or with friends”. 

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“But where are you going to put the bed?”

“What bed?”

“Where will you sleep?”

“I don’t like beds.” 

Eventually got what I wanted. 

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But back to the poem submission. At the time I had no idea I was autistic and I ended up writing a novella about the row house. More specifically about leaving the little row house and heading for a divorce. It was translated and published in Germany. I thought the novella might become a minor cult novella. How wrong I was. And looking at it now, I can see the autism in it leaping out of the pages and dancing around the room. Now that I understand this is the case, I have begun to revise the novella for publication in English. 

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But back to the poem submission. There was a call for creative autistic people to submit poems, stories, artwork. Here was my chance to be witnessed. I submitted a number of poems.  

I am proud to say that my poem “I like your shoes and I want to eat you” has been accepted for the publication of Unique Minds, An Anthology of Art, Poems and Stories by Autistic Creatives. The publication is edited by Rosemarie Cawkwell (of Faraway, Unique Minds in the UK) and is funded by the Amazon Literary Partnership.