My Window: By Toni Cross

 

My window

Keeps growing

Widening towards

The unending future

An expansive view

Into what may be

Fighting Gray… By Toni L.A. Cross

Noble warrior renowned

Listen to this harrowing sound

Draining cries of earth’s deep sorrow

We will live to see the morrow?

Life is leaking from a crack

Faceless death will now attack

Who has left us silent here?

What foe won’t visibly appear?

We know not who or why we fight

Though we press on in this bleak night

O! That gray would fade from sight

And black be black and white be white!

Autistic Alice: A Dream?

Last night I watched the original Disney cartoon of Alice in Wonderland and after that, spent some time reading Livvie Owen Lived Here, a book from the perspective of an autistic girl.

My allergies were bothering me, so before heading to bed, I took some Benadryl.

I fell asleep and found myself in a terrifying world where everything was upside-down. Somehow I knew that if I said the right words, everything would be okay again.

But the words were elusive. I tried and tried to say them, to capture them with my tongue. Words and sounds came out, but they were all jumbled and wrong.

I woke up in a cold sweat, mumbling nonsense phrases desperately like a mantra. Stumbling into the kitchen, I poured myself a glass of water and drank it with shaking hands. Still, over and over in my mind, phrases and words strung themselves in circles.

I grabbed a blanket and headed for the couch, not wanting to wake my husband.

I slipped back into my dream as if I’d never left.

All night I waged a war, trying to commandeer my words. They pranced and danced about me, just outside my grasp.

It suddenly struck me this morning- is that what it is like for someone who is autistic? A world upside-down? Filled with backwards things and elusive words?

Is Alice’s nightmarish Wonderland the way our world appears to an autistic child?

perspective… Toni L.A. Cross

perspective
is everything
and nothing at all

seeing
life broken
after the fall

dream
fully awake
forget yesterday’s death pall

look

open eyed
peer beyond the wall

tiny me… by Toni L.A. Cross

tiny little me
in a big grown up world
feeling so small
sleeping like a kitten curled
looking at the giant sky
breathless- endlessly unfurled
mixing with incomprehensible hugeness
my comfort out the window is hurled