She lives in self-inflicted padded walls
Created with cotton balls,
Elmer’s glue, squished on fun
By her autistic son
She schools him on the finer points of life while
She’s splashing in the shallow end
Of the dating pool
Yelling,
“MARCO!” in the language of JuJu.
The responses are comical if not misplaced
By distorted males riding by on penny pony floaties
They shout “CABBAGE!” or “BOK CHOY!” or “PETUNIA!”
From the deep end where she already dipped her mug
Into the drunken pissy beer and found the taste repugnant.
She rejects the self-proclaimed wise men and gurus
Whom are no more effective than arm-chair quarterbacks.
Instead she paints herself a wisdom
Of spiraling owls and feminine curly tailed girls
That return prosperity in accordance to her schoolgirl happy.
When she looks at her beloved son, she realizes,
She is his Sherlock, he, her Watson.
Where she is prismatic and lively
He is repetitive and monochromatic
But they take out the crayons together one by one
Exploring every color of the world as a dynamic duo
Some days, when she’s a grounded bird and doesn’t want to fly
Juju nurtures her with yesterday’s worms and reminds her to seek the sky.
Mare Martell 