I’m a working poet; I earn my bread with poems. The night my grandmother Yurdanur had a stroke, I was giving a keynote poetry reading at the University of Canberra. I’ve always been an excellent reader, which is not to be confused with speaker. In high school English, I loved when we would read plays, I could voice characters with ease whereas, if asked to stand and face the class with my own words, I’d sweat, frozen, panic beasting my blood. Similarly, whenever I give readings of my work, I’m told how much people love my voice, and so I’m often called a spoken word poet, which does a disservice to those practitioners: what I do is what I have always done, my one true obsession – read. Every night I read to my son before bed, for at least half an hour and sometimes more, and it’s easy, so easy to speak when you have a script. I have one for every relationship, and my mind is crammed with remembered film and television scripts, which I reference endlessly, because it’s far easier to quote something than to fill a gap with my own words. I use these lines as hand-rails in the dark, even within the sanctity of my own mind.

It was early December, I was walking back to the hotel, when my aunty called. Grandma is in the hospital, she said, we don’t know why. Here, talk to her. And I did, briefly. I told her I love her, and she said she loves me, which is our script, my favourite one; and no, if you’re wondering, repetition does not lessen a feeling. The stroke hit hours later and now our script has been muted. This is a dark win for my anxiety, my anticipatory grief, which has ruled how I think about grandma, who I was first introduced to with strict instructions to care for, because ‘she’s an old woman’. That was over a decade ago, and the instructors, my father and his brother, are both dead, their relative youth and strength as meaningless as her age. She had diabetes, high cholesterol, and three heart attacks – she even contracted Covid, and though in her mid-80s, unvaccinated, got through it. She was the strongest person I ever knew. In the three months following her stroke, before she finally passed from this life, God forgive me, I cursed her strength, what she endured because her muscle-memory is survival and there was nothing more alien to her than peace. I was there, praise be to God, in her last moments. I held her hand.

‘Anticipatory grief’ is just another way of saying ‘writing.’ To practice either is to be embedded in emotion, and I am never not writing, never not grieving. This is not to say I’m depressed, or unbearably sad – anyone who knows grief understands that it encompasses the totality of human experience, the full spectrum of feeling, which is what I am most oriented toward: the language of the soul, the felt, before it is clad. Whether you are a man or not, we live in patriarchy, which has put limits on precisely that. The more a feeling is expressed, the more disgust you are likely to generate, whether it is positive or negative, and if not disgust, then scepticism that the feeling is even genuine. How could it be, when there is so much? Tone it down, would you. Knock it off. Man up. Stop being a bitch. Get over it. Be sensible. Pull yourself together. Mourning is perhaps the only socially acceptable time we are allowed to unconditionally feel, and to express that feeling as radically and erratically as long as we like¹. It’s no wonder I’m always imagining death, and recording life, imperfect as the record is, because it’s the one province I’m allowed to let my spirit sing oh joyful joyful! And yes, it is joyous, even this. Loss is only love’s after-image after all, what we allow to linger.

One of the main stereotypes of autistic people is an inability or aversion to emotion, but the reality for me is the opposite: an extreme sensitivity, which early on was policed, restricted, suppressed. Buried beneath my silences, my stillness, these hallmarks of my childhood, there is a parade of my being too much, ecstatic and ridiculous, a constant cascade of feeling that had no appropriate language, and for each of these moments, a bruise, a smack, a shoving down or back. I used to speak to objects – the toaster, the curtains, the car – as if they were sentient, and my brother and cousins would point and laugh. Shame, fear of being laughed at, has coated all the land within me since, making each step toward a word harder. I’m both ashamed it’s taken this long to find out an essential part of myself, and unsurprised. For most of my life, I have been too busy surviving to be able to enact any kind of real care for myself. Once, at a festival with my friend, an Indonesian poet, we laughed at the absurd idea of going to doctors, getting specialised care – who had that kind of time and money? They showed me their hand, where they’d been bitten by a spider, which had a black circle of rotting flesh to mark the spot, and said even this was insufficient to warrant such extravagance. We are working class poets, fie on your middle-class assumptions! I’ve been there, too. I’ve knocked back Nurofen like Tic Tacs to swallow my wisdom tooth pain for years, and dressed it up in disdain, a masculine refusal. In my experience, the disadvantaged often use real problems to mask our fear, our desperation, hopelessness, a conditioned sense of not being worth it. I’m done with masks, and with fear – a delightfully manly declaration, but one made possible only through being loved.