What is a “good blue,” you ask?

How can a color be good or bad?
It’s just a color, neutral at best
Whatever you project onto it —
It’s not the blue that’s ugly; it’s you,

They tell me. My eye twitches
Pretending to be okay under this mask
You don’t see me
Wearing for you, to protect myself
From your belief that all hues are good
That the blues are always beautiful,

Wondering if this is how folks concluded
It’s okay to give someone the blues.
Are there no bad blues
No matter how much the blues hurt?

I’ve heard Native Americans say enough times
To know your monolingual English tongue,
Lazy from centuries of not having to work as hard,
Won’t hear me when I say

There are not words in your language
To tell you how sometimes colors burn the skin,
Fabrics speak louder than nonprofit leaders, and
Odd numbers disrupt digestion.

Did we ever have a language for these
Experiences before they were erased
From the history of existing?
Only to be called Autistic now
That our gifts have no name?

Instead, our gifts are called
Unemployed (You’re missing out.)
Non-verbal (If we were welcome to speak….)
Challenged (By whom? For what?)
A little strange (As if….)
Special needs (Why do you make humanity
A limited edition collectible

And paint it such a hideous shade
Of cerebral Disgust,
Disdain, and Hopelessness?)

You could have asked an autistic person
What “special” color to make our jack o lanterns.
We would have told you the truth
And saved you the trouble of mass-producing
All those plastic blue pumpkins
For sub-human wages in China:

You close your eyes and ask the pumpkin
What it wants to be,
What it was meant to be,
What it knows from spending its whole life
In the plain light of God’s daily vision,
Growing and accumulating everything
The Earth and Water and Wind and Farmer
Have loved into the pumpkin with Purpose.

You listen first
Then support the pumpkin in Becoming
Beautifully.

The pumpkin may tell you about the blue
It knew at 1:57 Central Standard Time
Three suns after the summer solstice beside a rabbit,
Looking into the sky just
Between a unicorn cloud and a fish cloud,
Laughing about

Three stars walking into a stellar nursery;
One says to the others,
“Hey, I need some new material
For my comedy show next week.”

Or the good blue in the Farmer’s
Faded denim coveralls
Inherited from the dad they never really
Got to know as well as the pumpkin.

Good blues, the pumpkin would choose,
Or purple, with a pink spiral down one side
Painted stars in pearl white down another
Each ridge stretching brilliantly into meaning
From within.

Pumpkins are non-binary, after all,
Like humans.

I guess I’m just saying
If you think there’s no such thing as a bad blue,
You aren’t qualified to be making choices
For any autistic person in the first place.

Go sit in the Pumpkin Patch
Until your heart is sincere enough
And then ask the Great Pumpkin
About Linus’s blanket.