if ever a crown of thorns were plaited / hammered into place with a rock / it’s neurodiversity / which fits Spock’s definition of logic in an old Star Trek episode / a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad ² / blossoms to ache the brain and worry everyone around me / like those bushes over Teri’s head and mine / butter-tinted buds amid bright green leaves / full of pollen / which carpets black trash cans yellow / Teri wheezes and goes into coughing fits / and it feels like someone smacked me across the nose and forehead with a 2x4 / that wreath / takes a sledge hammer to my head from the inside / makes it throb with the words / WRONG / WORTHLESS / BAD / like whenever I tried to say something right around Dad / in the proper tone / his rebukes both drove and ripped as they flowered / as much tearing down as building / now I gaze into a mirror and see him / thorns halo his head / blood trickles down one temple / his words are howls of pain / blossoming / rising in tone like a nail biting into wood / friction and compression driving them together / a sharp bang when the nail head’s flush / Dad’s only a ghost now / even so with each mistake / every awkward conversation / those words hammer through brain into bone / WRONG / WORTHLESS / BAD / and I tell myself that I’m okay / what I’m feeling is pollen on a breeze / the air will clear

Poet’s Commentary

I had heard a couple of ministers mention the Crown of Thorns as both a metaphor and a point of identification with those who suffer from mental illness. Michelle Tennison’s monoku reminded me of this point, along with the continual self-shaming and erosion of self-esteem that neurodivergents like myself often face. The monoku also called to mind that neurodiversity is an inherited condition, and dealing with the complicated emotional legacy Dad left with his passing includes that inheritance. Patty Seyburn pointed out in our MFA workshop that simply demonizing a person in writing actually does an injustice to both subject and author. But delving deeper and further past that level can allow real meaning and growth to take place.

Between the first and second drafts of this poem, I also came across a prompt from Rattle magazine: Write a poem that rallies against its own epigraph.³ I took this, in addition to Patty’s advice, as a challenge to dig deeper for “the poem behind the poem.” Dad was extremely good at masking his neurodivergence in public (a survival tactic which can pack its own share of emotional and mental baggage). Once the mask came off, he was very much a victim to perfectionism and emotional oversensitivity. I took his tendency to explode as a hair-trigger temper—something to fear and avoid for my own well-being. With 60-odd years of being my father’s child, I would now say he was overstimulated, overwhelmed, and in immediate need of a safety valve. Had I become more cognizant in my early-adult years of what was going on and had he become more open to discussing it, we might have figured out a way mutually to work together and affirm each other.

One positive thing we had in common was Star Trek. My brother and I were allowed to stay up late on Thursday nights to watch the show when it first aired, camped with Dad on the living-room floor. I suspect Spock, with his reliance on logic and deductive reasoning, was Dad’s favorite character, just as he had enjoyed Paladin on Have Gun Will Travel some years earlier. “I, Mudd” remains among my three favorite Star Trek episodes. The Spock quotation came into my poem on its own volition, probably aided by my subconscious tendency to fall back on pop culture and references—another and more positive aspect of neurodiversity, with its propensity for cognitive leaps and tangential connections.

Publisher’s Note:

In the “I, Mudd” episode (also one of my faves), Spock and the Enterprise crew have been trapped by androids on the planet Mudd. To escape, Spock attempts to overload the androids with nonsensical or paradoxical statements, such as “Logic is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad. Are you sure your circuits are registering correctly? Your ears are green.”

The scene is available on YouTube, “Confuse the Androids, Part 2”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAQo560FGnE

Bio: Jonathan Yungkans