Tourette’s Syndrome is a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary motor or vocal ‘tics’, which are sudden, rapid, and
repetitive movements or sounds.
poetry.
Through your eyes you read, you consume
And when you boil with rage
You take pen to page
And you let yourself fume
And you produce.
And when your fathers temper becomes too much
Your poet heart bleeds
Not red, but blue black ink
and everything you think
You produce.
You watch hazy eyes portion out those white lines
You form lines of your own, rhymed grief
Turn your pain into lines of art, brief
for hungry poets here before you
Eagerly sitting and waiting for you
To produce.
And this production line
Tiptoes the border of insanity
At what point does writing about
Yourself become vanity?
Packaged, products of paragraphed pain
Lines of emotions whose only aim
Was to let a heart see
But between you and me
When a poet’s heart sees, it bleeds
And you produce
You produce what you see
So my dear i see you
And my poet’s heart bleeds
its blue black ink for you
don’t think
for a second
that no one cares because i do.
and my poor poets heart
it didn’t bleed but it cracked
when the specialist
gave me a pat on the back
and said
“everything will be okay.”
when my diagnosis was revealed
And my mother’s face fell
And her sweet steel heart
Cracked and shattered and melt
On the foor of a hospital room
They gave us after 8 hours in the ER
But those hours of wait
did not help our case
It took months of chase
A cat and mouse game as i tell them my name
Age
Height and weight.
My weight goes down but my movements go up
My fngers curl up and my snaps crackle pop
Like the neurons in my brain misfring their signals
I signaled to my mother that something was wrong
And she asked me what’s wrong with you
My child
Her child’s hands were not her own
My hands are no longer my own
They diagnosed me with tourettes.
Tourettes is a disease of invisible strings
Wound around your limbs till it stings
The strings take your hands and hold them steady
You snap and twist before you are ready
You lose yourself.
Invisible strings bound my wrists
They gave me an axe and said “hold it steady.”
Steady like the beating of my mothers heart
The heart that splintered with every twitch
Every turn of my fngers
Every sound from my mouth
Was like holding an axe that i slowly brought down-
and remember a poet’s heart bleeds ink.
My heart bleeds ink but my mother’s bled red
Spilling in torrents on the foor as she read
Every article poring through remedies
To fx her daughter but all her hypotheses
See that nothing will work.
And invisible strings have bound my hands
And invisible hands have given me an axe
And this axe acts out swings and for all of its practice
It never misses.
It fnds my mother’s heart like a bullet true
And cleaves her bleeding heart all the way through
And as i write tainted with the stain
The sticky sweet remnants of my sweet mothers pain
as i bleed my heart onto this page
I will stain this here stage with blue and black ink
and since my poet heart is bleeding
let me get straight to producing
and just tell y’all something real quick
it can take my autonomy
use my limbs for puppetry
but they can never
take away
my poetry.
Aisling Panjwani
Artist Statement
This poster is inspired by a poem by Aisling Panjwani of Young Chicago Authors. I attempt to show the vulnerability, conflict, and defiance that Panjwani shares through a thoughtful poem about being diagnosed with Tourette’s Syndrome.
Young Chicago Authors
Young Chicago Authors offers high-quality programs that nurture artistic development, social-emotional learning, and academic success through poetry and performance. Its Rooted & Radical Youth Poetry Festival is the largest of its kind in the world, gathering over 200 youth poets from across Chicago, Chicago-land, and Northwest Indiana. The festival centers storytelling over competition and fosters listening, empathy, and creative risk. The ten poets featured here advanced through the 2025 festival and offered lines that were impossible to ignore.
Poetry Foundation
This program is made possible with support from the Poetry Foundation, which amplifies poetry and celebrates poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry.
