Feb. 18, 2024
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Heaven is all goodbyes, but I hope it’s soft
By Said Shiaye
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Heaven is all goodbyes, but I hope it’s soft
By Said Shaiye
(first published in The Texas Review)
Softness of skin, softness of thought.
Call me soft and I’ll send you a heart.
Won’t do fisticuffs, just brisket cuts.
When ppl called me soft, I found I’d be ashamed.
Now I call myself soft, to rebuke that disdain.
Autistic, sensitive to everything.
Autistic, we don’t speak the same.
Autistic, in every poem I sing.
Autistic, in every song I cry.
Using tears to wipe ink smudge from my pants cuffs.
Drowning in words, living for life.
Heard it once told that life is wasted on the living.
And death isn’t something we should dwell on.
All I know for certain is life exists on
the fence between hope and hopelessness.
It’s like a seesaw, being Autistic,
swinging from joy to a meltdown.
Sensory overwhelm, need something soft to calm me down.
The good Lord blessed me with soft skin,
So, I caress myself for comforting.
My masseuse, twenty years in the game, once : I had The Softest Skin.
The softest skin she’d ever felt.
Like velvet, like felt.
I took the compliment.
But deep down, I knew Autism was to thank. Autism & Allah.
One of the primary features of EDS, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, is velvet
soft skin.
EDS is associated with ASD.
I hate how white people attach syndrome or disorder to
everything they don’t understand, and I hate how negative
connotations are attached to those attachment.
Syndrome is attached to my name
which perhaps explains the negative connotations
I attach to my-same-self-said-Said-Saciid-name.
What’s a shorter word for connotation?
How about: bro pass me the cream cheese and a
light. Pass me the hookah and a sprite.
Pass me fatty food & bring to stummy great delight.
Better yet, pass me a prescription for my ADHD.
So I don’t have to self-medicate just to get thru life.
And if you can spare it, pass me that peace of mind.
Right behind two lost lovers stuck beneath time.
And the metronome which hangs over us all.
ticking… tocking… clicking… clocking…
Bombs over Baghdad, bombs over Baidabo.
Bombs over Kyiv, bombs over Kurdish Peshmerga.
Yung Nigga, ever a learner.
Never have I clutched a burner.
That’s a lie, but I was born in the land where AKs
are cheaper than grains of sand.
And sand is all we understand.
The sun is all we have.
The Blackness of our skin, protecting us from it.
White ppl colonized Africa but 400 years
after the Dutch erected limp castles on our
land … their descendants’ skin still peels off
in the sun.
They can’t even protect skin from sun, yet we’re the inferior ones?
Anyway.
None of that matters anyway.
I just pray I get to see
heaven one day. Wish
heaven on earth for all my
ppl.
Wish heaven was easier to get into.
But as the Prophet PBUH once
said… the road to heaven is paved with
hardship, the road to hell paved with ease.
So if this life is any
testament, heaven
just may be in our
future. At least we
hope.
And hope is all I have
these days, when nights turn
to day, turn to nights again.
When the blood moon
serenades my waking dreams.
When Larry Levis’ ghost writes living poems in Fresno, Modesto, San
Diego.
Takes the form of dirt devils,
sand tornados, uses wind to carve
poems about nothing into still more
nothing.
Migrant farmers step
over stillborn poems as they
pluck fruit destined to be
tossed from suburban
fridges.
I got
cousins back
home who’ve
never seen
strawberries
or fridges.
I don’t know what that means, but I should probably cherish something.
At least while I still can.
Lord knows they could be on their way.
Shit I think they knocking on my door right now.
No Knock Raid.
Ain’t that how the last brother got ?
(I mean shot)
Shit, I mistook their guns for .
Ain’t that what they said
about the brother they killed before
him? (HE WAS SHOT) I thought it
was a ?
A 9mm Glock ?
This is Minnesota – all we
export is frigid ice & police lies.
Murder, too, tho. We export a lot of
murder here.
Shit. AM I NEXT? I wonder what lie they’ll export about my murder?
I pray I’m not next. And every one of my brothers prays
he’s not next. In a country that values our bodies only in
death.
And we know every traffic stop could be our death.
In the land of never quite making rent.
Ahhhh this place is hell.
But is that such a bad thing?
Hell is hard &
Hardship leads to heaven.
And heaven is all we have to keep us going.
Heaven is all goodbyes, but I hope it’s soft.
I hope heaven is softer than this life.
& I hope I see you on
the other side.
Said Shaiye
Said Shaiye is an Autistic + ADHD (AuHD) Somali Writer & Photographer in Minneapolis. He is a 2024 MacDowell Colony Fellow as well as a 2024 AWP Panelist: Autistic Writers On The Inaccessibility Of Professional Writing Spaces (Organizer, Participant); The Anti-Ableist Writing Workshop (Participant).
He was nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize by Indiana Review for his essay SNEAK A UZI ON THE ISLAND IN MY ARMY JACKET LINING. His debut book, Are You Borg Now?, was a 2022 Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Memoir. His work has appeared in Texas Review, Obsidian, Brittle Paper, Diagram and elsewhere. He teaches writing at several Twin Cities community colleges, as well as with Unrestricted Interest, an organization dedicated to neurodivergent ways of being. Send all hate mail to www.saidshaiye.com
Image description: "A handsome bald Black man with a beard sits on a park bench. He is facing the camera with his hands clasped in his lap. He is wearing a black suit jacket and slacks as well as a white henley-type short sleeve shirt. There are trees in the background and you only see him from waist up."