Poems About Autism and Other Work by Autistic Poets
Selected and introduced by Brendan McDonald
Originally published . Updated .
Poems about autism can describe the effort of masking, the pleasure of movement or the frustration of being misunderstood. They can also disagree with one another.
These 15 poems come from autistic writers. The first ten explore autistic experience directly; the remaining five take us into other parts of their work, including family, grief and imagination. Short autism poems sit alongside longer pieces that need more room.
Below, you’ll find brief excerpts, reading notes and links to the complete published texts. These are individual works, not a collective statement about how being autistic is supposed to feel.
Poems about autism and autistic experience
1. “The Beauty of Autistic Knowing” by Adam Wolfond
Adam Wolfond is a nonspeaking autistic poet. In this poem, he recounts the pressure to produce speech and the difficulty of expressing himself within someone else’s expectations.
The way of learning pace
was how I learned to string
The poem, from The Wanting Way, moves between that experience and a different understanding of language: something felt through the body and the surrounding world. Images of immersion give his thinking a physical presence.
Read it with attention to who gets to decide what counts as expression. Wolfond’s account puts that decision back in his hands.
Read the full poem at the Academy of American Poets.
2. “this autistic guise” by Oakley Ayden
may i stim before you, love? or
must i keep up with my masking? just
Masking enters an intimate relationship here. The speaker asks whether her movements and expressions are welcome, or whether she’s expected to perform a non-autistic version of herself.
Ayden’s questions run across the line breaks, sometimes leaving a word waiting for the next line to complete it. That small delay suits the uncertainty of the conversation. The speaker wants to be seen without having to keep checking which parts of herself are acceptable.
The journal’s contributor biography identifies Ayden as an autistic, queer writer. Her lowercase wording is retained in this excerpt.
Read the full poem in Not Very Quiet’s archive.
3. “Stimulation” by Elise Hoekstra
Hoekstra introduces this piece as an account of what sensory overload looks like for her. Its five short prose sections move through hearing, sight, smell, touch and taste.
I can’t focus. Individual voices blur.
The particulars do the work. Several voices become difficult to separate. Scented candles linger in clothing. Fabric sits wrong against the skin.
There’s also a detail that resists an overly tidy explanation: uncomfortable brightness appears alongside an observation that California sunshine doesn’t bother her. Hoekstra writes about particular sensations in particular circumstances. Read the piece as her account, rather than as a checklist for recognising autism in somebody else.
Read the full poem at Printed Matter Vancouver.
4. “What Could Be Called Communication” by Kate Fox
Fox has explained that this poem grew from attending Autscape, an autistic conference, in 2019. She recognised herself in other people and experienced a sense of autistic community.
One sentence catches the uncertainty of assuming other people perceive what you perceive:
They think everyone can see the fluorescent lights humming.
The poem notices earphones, shifting feet and places to retreat from a crowd. Then its attention widens to people finding one another.
Its tentative phrasing matters. Fox offers observations rather than declaring that every autistic person behaves the same way. The ordinary details around a tea urn become part of a poem about recognition and communication.
Read the full poem in Jonathan Totman’s authorised reproduction.
5. “Remember My Spectrum” by Traci Neal
Remember my spectrum.
Take time to read me.
I am a black autistic woman.
Neal’s poem brings Black autistic identity into the same space as sunlight, music and the experience of rejection. Its repeated consonant sounds give the lines a lively, insistent rhythm.
She writes openly about pleasure and positivity while acknowledging hostility around her. Those feelings belong to this speaker; they don’t need to become an expectation placed on other autistic people.
The ending is a request for attention. Neal has spent the poem describing a life from the inside. She asks the reader to take the time to see it.
Read the full poem at The Art of Autism.
6. “Don’t Let The Mask Slip” by Robbie Janzen
Finding an explanation for being different can bring relief without making every subsequent interaction easy. That tension runs through Janzen’s conversational poem.
Every day, I have to roll the dice over and over
The speaker moves from recognising himself in an autistic identity to describing the calculations involved in meeting other people. Being understood remains uncertain.
Janzen leaves that uncertainty in place. The ending makes room for people who accept difference, but it doesn’t pretend that the effort has disappeared. Its plain language gives the poem the feel of someone telling you what a day actually involves.
Read the full poem at The Art of Autism.
For another first-person perspective, read URevolution’s essay about living with autistic masking.
7. “Autism Speaks” by Tre Ventour
Ventour’s speaker has had enough of other people deciding what acceptable autism looks like.
cus I can’t just be autistic in private
Published on Ventour’s own poetry account in 2021, the poem draws on his experience. It challenges demands about how quickly he should speak and how visibly autistic he’s allowed to be.
The image of bringing stims into a family birthday celebration makes the argument concrete. Public life and private identity can’t be separated as neatly as other people might prefer. The voice is impatient, funny in places, and unwilling to make itself more comfortable for its audience.
Read the full poem on Tre Ventour’s poetry account.
8. “Heaven is all goodbyes, but I hope it’s soft” by Said Shaiye
Call me soft and I’ll send you a heart.
Shaiye, an autistic Somali writer who also identifies as having ADHD, begins by reclaiming softness from people who have treated it as an insult.
The poem then travels through sensory experience, faith and racial violence. An opening joke has to coexist with fear for his life. That movement gives the repeated wish for softness a different weight by the end.
This is a longer piece. Give it time beyond the opening excerpt: much of its force comes from the distance between where it begins and where it takes you.
Content note: the full poem includes racism, war, police violence and strong language.
Read the full poem and access the audio at Zoeglossia.
9. “Eros of Bathing Stimming Dancing Pacing” by Adam Wolfond
pace pace pace the talking
and type type type the thinking
This second Wolfond selection puts movement at the centre of the writing. The repeated actions establish a rhythm before the poem expands into water, dancing and the pleasure of making language.
There’s a sharp political edge too. Wolfond objects to the expectation that people should be tidied into an acceptable version of humanity. His movement and expression have value on their own terms.
The Poetry Foundation page includes audio produced through Wolfond’s text-to-speech device, offering another way to encounter the poem’s pacing.
Read or listen to the full poem at the Poetry Foundation.
10. “The Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful Dreaming Beast” by Hannah Emerson
Emerson’s poem carries a sentence through a succession of transformations. Ground becomes a place of connection; bridges and openings keep appearing.
Its final line reads:
beast that we are yes yes.
Repetition is central to the writing. Words return with small changes, giving the poem its movement and allowing an image to develop rather than settle immediately into a single explanation.
Emerson is a nonspeaking autistic poet and artist. The Wordgathering publication includes an audio reading by Chris Martin, alongside the written text. The reader and the poet are credited separately.
Read the full poem or listen to the reading at Wordgathering.
More poems by autistic writers
The next five selections broaden the reading. Autism isn’t their explicit subject throughout. Their authors write about pride, exclusion, family and loss, before a final poem takes us into an imagined world.
11. “Pride Is” by Janine Booth
Booth begins by testing familiar accusations against pride: that it’s sinful, boastful or something you must earn through exceptional achievement. She even considers staying home with the cat.
Then the poem turns towards people who have been treated as faulty or unwanted.
Pride is refusal to feel ashamed.
The closing statement has been earned by the argument before it. Pride becomes a response to prejudice, rather than a claim to be better than somebody else.
Booth’s website places the poem within autism, disability and LGBT+ liberation. Its reach is deliberately broader than one identity.
Read the full poem on Janine Booth’s website.
That argument also connects with the distinction between autism acceptance and awareness.
12. “Aged Out” by Hamy Downs
Aged out, with nowhere to go
Downs’s author biography identifies him as an autistic poet who was raised by the state of California. That context matters to a poem organised around the repeated language of ageing out.
The refrain becomes increasingly difficult to read as a neutral administrative phrase. It carries anger, insecurity and the feeling of having nowhere to belong.
Near the end, the wording shifts into the continuing action of ageing. Time has passed; the sense of exclusion persists. Downs doesn’t supply a reassuring resolution, and the poem shouldn’t be edited into one.
Read the full poem at The Art of Autism.
13. “Imperfect” by Michael Simms
This short poem keeps returning to a woman named Elizabeth and the trees she used to walk among.
She used to walk among these trees
but doesn’t anymore.
Each return changes the sentence slightly. Language circles an absence without managing to undo it.
In his accompanying note, Simms connects the repeated phrasing with his own autism and describes his difficulty finding words for a feeling-memory. That context adds to the reading, but the poem also stands as an account of grief: trying again to say something because the previous attempt still doesn’t feel sufficient.
Read the full poem and author’s note at the Academy of American Poets.
14. “The Caseworker Speaks of a Good Fit” by DJ Savarese
A boy stays in bed while a familiar domestic world takes shape around him.
The warmth of the sheets envelops him.
Coffee and crossword clues share space with the expectation of breakfast. Against those details, the title’s administrative language acquires a more personal meaning: the possibility of feeling at home.
Savarese explains in his author’s note that the crossword framing comes from his grandfather. Memories of violence interrupt the scene, but they don’t occupy all of it. The poem gives just as much attention to safety and affection.
Savarese is a nonspeaking autistic writer and the co-producer of the documentary Deej.
Read the full poem and author’s note at the Academy of American Poets.
15. “The Genie Speaks” by Nathan Spoon
Spoon ends this selection with an invented speaker and a world that refuses to remain a sensible size.
although not knowing feels satisfactory and good:
The poem moves through shifting scale and strange images, finding room for uncertainty without rushing to explain it away. In his accompanying note, Spoon describes building a sonnet from two seven-line stanzas.
The genie is a fictional speaker. There’s no need to decode it as a disguised account of autism. Spoon, whose publisher biography identifies him as autistic, is making something with language and imagination. That work belongs in an autistic poetry collection too.
Read the full poem and author’s note at the Academy of American Poets.
Reading and sharing these poems
Read the complete poem before choosing a line for a class, event or social post. The surrounding words may complicate the sentence that first caught your attention.
Keep the poet’s name attached to the work. Preserve their wording and line breaks, and use the linked publication to check the text. Don’t rewrite a poem to make its language match your own preferences.
That respect extends to how writers describe themselves. URevolution’s discussion of “autistic person” and “person with autism” considers why the person being described should have a say.
From URevolution’s shop: Neurodivergent clothing and gifts.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article included attributions we couldn’t substantiate. This replacement selection links to the published poems discussed and identifies their authors.
About Brendan McDonald
Brendan McDonald co-founded URevolution in 2018. He is a disabled Australian living with chronic illness, he previously worked in UN humanitarian and emergency-management roles.
