I have a son with Autism and he has bad anxiety and sometimes hallucinates. I have been trying to get him sleeping in his own bedroom (he’s 12) but last night he had a really bad panic attack and was hallucinating. It breaks my heart…

Oh, my son
The tears dripping down your ashen face
Falling from deep within, a place
Where childhood dreams turn sour
Where the careless day becomes the anxious hour
And the hallucinations and nightmares come to devour
Your poor mind.

The sobs become cries become yells become screams
With the nightmares victorious over suffocated dreams
And you shake
And you shake
And your carefree spirit aches
And the bastard anxiety takes
What sanctity I try to make
In your head
Your screwed-up head.

Once a joyous ocean
But now a choked-up lake
And every day you fake
Every day to school your smiles you take
Like a cyanide laden cake
That you eat alone.
And you choke
On your insecurities
Gone are the childhood ways
The sitting on your mother’s knee
While she kisses your sore finger better
And hello
To this inability
To grow
Hello to the nasty fucking paranoia
And the seeds the anxiety sows
And the fear that through this wrecked bundle of autism and emotional delays
Flows

And I cannot see what you are seeing my love
I cannot feel the fear
As faceless faces fly towards your eyes
And your desperate breath escapes
To some nightmare psychosis place
And anxiety invades your only safe space
With your mother.

We have the experts
Three years fucking with assessments and funding
Yet that can’t buy a boy a crystal mind
Put the textbooks down and take a look behind
Your degrees
And your astronomical fees
And set this boy free
For this anomaly
Will not die if he
Always feels alone
If his mother’s omnipotent love he cannot see.
And another brick in the Pink Floyd wall he will grow up
To be.

©2020 Sarah Drury