CW: ableism, ableist slurs

Let words reign again as they once did –          not a poet of cripples, but of fucked 

in the head, face turned corner-ward,                cone on the crown. What was said 

way back, when? Nothing new under                the sun. Retard, dummy, tool, not all there, 

slow, useless, I once was a nonce human          of grunt, a corner hum. Stim is the song 

of this dunce. At age forty-four, still I case       each room for its corner. How better to know 

a place than where to live within it as exile?     Love to corners, the four points that form 

the normal shape, squared sharp, my prison      coordinates – I said love and I meant 

it, because I’m a dunce with no self-pity.          I licked you. I still do. You were tasty. Still are.

My resonating hum sent back at my hated        blunt head, blank square standing on guard 

for shame at the Pixieland Day Care Centre     near Hubbard Avenue Elementary – ah, 

the past as sound. Dunce! Once upon a time    truth, as monster’s illumination, rose.

Fists curled, heated towards the sound.            Yet what was once said as epithet – Dunce! – 

now means a hallowed state, inaccessible        to you and in excess of you; our sense 

of time not your time; our coeval relation        with objects not yours. This is yours: Dunce! 

uttered as nonce name of a New Brunswick    quarantine where love continues to grow 

strange because it, too, cannot escape              its four corners. Posture as silly-putty, 

as Quasimodean hills like white elephants,      as Lurch with a buffalo hump. I love like 

this and I Dunce! like I love: with fingers        pressed to lips and then to sky which is 

a ceiling capping the north corner of my          bedroom, father’s wood table blocking access –

You love like what? How am I in love?           Like this: standing on guard in the corner 

for beauty itself, as ugly transpires. Dunce!     Ugliness of normal life. So many similar grunts

overheard, but coordinated as laughter. Not    understanding corner pedagogy – an infinitely

recreated asylum, compass points marking      normietown – I wanted love but learned to hate 

my difference. Let’s call their reason beauty.  So I stood in the corner with shame. Dunce! Let us

recover then, you and I, with the ceiling          as our sky. Why ask why of darkness? Do this 

with me, now. Identify a corner in your          bedroom. Stand there for half an hour, as close

you’ll get to being a dunce & beauty for love prefers the conical hat. Slur manifestoes 

of being in love with love; we mutter             In love with love with lisps, stutters, muffled; 

call us simpletons. Dunces. Go ahead.            For we’re in love, and not like you, not like you 

at all.