I wrote to Matthew and told him about Osime and his wonderful mother, Joan. I also sent him Osime’s artwork.
Right now, Matthew and Osime have things in common that are unique to only the two of them. Their faces have become symbols of inequality at the intersection of race and being autistic. Their mothers fight day and night for their freedom. Thousands have prayers in their minds day and night that they will be spared from a social misstep that will threaten their safety.
They are the Black autistic victims of racism and criminalization.
But those weren’t the details which inspired Matthew to feel such an immediate kinship. It was Osime’s art. He saw it as complementarity, like quantum coherence and entanglement, existing in two places in two ways, two sides of a cosmic coin, with Osime’s drawings being an alternate property of existence to his poetry.
A transposition of artwork by Osime Brown
Each and every time
I capture a face in my poems,
I do so with the most delicate words.
Because, like a painter caressing
her face,
using nothing but his brush,
I wish to be as gentle.
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One Response
This is incredible. It brought tears to my eyes. Over the years I’ve been part of many poetry contests and rarely do I see the depth that can be captured by an Autistic heart and yet I stand stunned at this symbiosis of artists wrongfully detained where their words exist as hope in a dark world. For them, for me , for others that can learn from Matthew, from Osime.