If your body is a miracle
Then your brain is the next step up.
Combined, they dance through time,
Glory in the stretch of senses,
Caressed by music, soothed by scents,
Blessed with the fine detail in
This palimpsest of... everything –
Picking up the fine Baroque flourishes
Where some only get the broad swish of
Primary colours.
And then there’s the other end
When things only you can discern
Are pinscratch discords across the
Chorus of creation, discolouration
Staining paradise,
A dissonant stink that threatens safety,
And all this a myth to the majority.
Even those who choose to believe you
Wince only with embarrassment’s syncope,
Where others take offence at your
Fist-clench, flinch, rock, tic, and mimicry.
They are only eating,
Only breathing,
Only crackling,
Only drinking,
Only being.
And you, guest attempting to rest on
Fathoms-deep mattresses,
Have no choice but to suffer,
Or dig out the pea,
Or leave, fleeing back into the tempest.
And yet the world will continue
To test you, never call you Princess,
And if only you could sleep,
The details of this ever-present soundscape
Could be a gift again.
Rich and rare as silence.
I’ve here written before about having synaesthesia. Among my other fun neurodiversities (neuroadversities?) are hyperacusis and associated misophonia. Another poet with misophonia reached out today on Facebook while I was deep in Write All The Poems mode, and this, rather unsurprisingly, turned up. I vividly remember my grandmother reading me the story of the Princess and the Pea. I hated it, yet kept coming back to it. It felt wrong on so many levels. We can certainly level a lot of feminist criticism at it, and betrayal of the ancient code of hosting strangers, but the deliberate torture of someone of a sensitive nature in order that she prove her assertion always seemed wrong to me, even if I didn’t have the vocabulary for it at the time.
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