On Ritalin

Iambic pentameter
Pedantic imitator
It worked well for a while
But took too much guile;
So what had to pass did,
The boy did fly the coop
Some things cannot be co-opted
Restlessness certainly not.

An imitation is an imitation
Pentameter and limerick
Haiku and free verse
Order and chaos.

Androgen and oestrogen brook no challenge to its order or its chaos entropy its religion it demands not to be understood moving moving what will be will be be be be... sex junk grime n' roll words dancing on a rooftop verbs jostling on a dance floor vertical expressions horizontal intentions lives lived spherically Frederico Fellini; move it move it! smell that sound listen to the picture, listen! double scoops of dark, brooding, frothing angst, in all flavours butterscotch, vanilla and bitter almonds, black as the blackest bitter, rush! karma, kama, autos da fe, run run....

Just leave the lad to his poetry.

Epilogue

Unrelated, and yet related.

Picture having to live in a video arcade with the volume and wattage up full, where everyone around you is racing past, speaking Mandarin at the top of their lungs. Your shirt feels like Brillo, your shoes like cement, and the breeze on your skin like the thwack of a soaking towel that's been left to chill in the fridge.

The only thing that's helped, and that just barely, is a mix of powerful drugs.... Forty years ago most kids like mine were raised in institutions. Luke may still wind up in a residential school, coming home to Elaine or me on weekends. For now, we're doing all we can to fend that off, day by day.

Returning from the road, he found his wife at her wits' end and his young son 'lost, a different person'. At the beach one day Isaiah was throwing a fit when Izzy had a bold idea. Grabbing his board in one hand and his four-year-old in the other, he jumped in the water and paddled out. Riding his first swell straight into shore, Isaiah grew calm, then exultant. Over days and months of riding point on Izzy's board, a different boy emerged from his cell of symptoms. He began again to talk, his mood improved, and his frustration lessened; clearly there was something tonic about sluicing through water on a shim of fibreglass and foam.

Surfers Healing, born from that eureka moment, has grown into a bona-fide movement.

Though the notion of surfing as therapy for autism is so novel that no one has studied it, a number of eminent neuroscientists I talk with later are willing to venture a guess as to why it might work.

Since the day five years ago when Zuckerman got a call from the mother of a child with autism, he has surfed, free of charge, with dozens of children who run the clinical gamut. Blind kids, deaf kids, quadriplegics - he has put them in the water, with grand results. 'It's the same thing each time,' he says. 'They panic at first, then get totally amped on the wave.'

Soundlessly we turn an arabesque, a father and young son dancing stag. Carrying him off to bed then, a thought occurs, and I lower him in my arms till he's horizontal. 'Lukey's surfing,' I sing as we sluice the room. 'My brave little boy is surfing.'

He puts his arms out to skim the waves and says, 'Whee, whee, whee' all the way in.

For more information, go to: http://www.surf2live.com/; http://www.surfershealing.org/ and http://www.rideawave.org/