Just Another Zero…

[0]

What label has been given to you? I know mine. I know the words; I know the labels; I know the criteria. This is what my PCP calls Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; the thing that this is trying to describe is something I call; Running From Zero. After 3 years of daily Adderall dosages of 10mg/2x daily I found myself no closer to being able to calm down my hyperactivity and control my attention than I was in the first place; the hyperactivity on Adderall only manifested itself in bruxism and a tightening of my muscles and mood; I could focus; I could zero in on some-thing and that would be the focus for me…

But I was just running from a different Zero.

ADHD is a label to describe something that the animal side of me is doing; it’s panicking; it’s wild; it doesn’t know how to behave as a human; it’s just faking it. ADHD describes that sense; the loss of calm; the loss of self; the loss of control.

Running From Zero is my word for it because it’s how it makes sense to me in a senseless world.

My Zero is a calm; it’s also a sphere; the sphere of everything my senses are feeding me; the present rumble of the AC unit mixed with the chirping of cicadas outside; the sense of the chair touching my ass, legs, elbow, back; I can see what I am typing and I feel the keys beneath my fingers and I can smell the Coumarin Pipe Tobacco I use for my vaporizer pen; I can taste that too. This place here; this is my Zero right now. This moment; living in the Now; this is my Zero.

I am not centered on an axis between attention and a deficiency of it; I am not a 2 dimensional zero on a + and – axis of hyperactive and calm; I am a sphere of my senses that collapse into a specific focus; I have many axis on which I may travel; X, Y, Z.

When I leave my Zero I become anxious; I lose my connection to my calm; I feel lost amongst a vast depth of stars and chaos as cosmos; when I find myself in my Zero; I know the world goes on; I know the universe continues to universe; I know that wars are fought; I know that I love; I know that the Hubble Space Telescope should be funded; I know what is happening in the south; I know who my neighbors are.

With ADHD or when Running From Zero; the calm breaks; severely; I carry with me a nervous energy that feels like I’m inside of a Fisher-Price Brilliant Basics Corn Popper.

When I don’t run from Zero I find my calm; I am within a sphere of my immediate senses and the frightening world that I do my best to be a part of dissolves; I am only me as I carry my Zero with me; nothing is frightening here; nothing is a trigger; there is no anxiety; this is where I can love from.

This video shows (better than I could have hoped) the sensation of having ADHD; not allowing ADHD to have me that is; I have it; by the throat and I’m telling it; your name is Zero.

Taking my PCP’s label and, instead, naming it in the way I understand it gives me the control I require; I don’t have a daily medication doing it for me; I have me; in my Zero; doing it for me.

The art is allways a long process; the process itself though; that’s the art. The image at the end; that’s only the result; this video is me; me; fully enveloped by Zero; fully still in Zero; fully calm in Zero; knowing that if I run from it – it runs with me – so I keep it.

This video itself is one of my Zeroes; all of my poems, each are a Zero; my love; my fiancé; you and I make my favorite Zero.

Welcome to my Zero; I am in love with being where it is calm.

Vox Semperviva

One.

“Maxwell,” it spoke, “are you ready?“

 

Eyes open now, startled to wake by not the sound rather the sensation of this voice; the self unspirling must’ve been a consequence of this dream for on July 4th, 2014 Maxwell had woken completely sober. He felt his day intoxicating from dawn into a set of crepuscular fireworks fornicating with the stars and impregnating each fabulous flash of skyline fire expounding into the simultaneous birthing of what Maxwell named in a whisper, “shadow flies.” Just slight tears or tears across the motley conflagration of an instant in the out-landing spatters of each explosion, like a smashed ink bottle or what the big bang would look like in slow motion, each dripping comma of colored fire turned negative in his eyes and became a myriad whirling dervish of black phosphenes. 

 

He breathed the sulfur fragrant air only a half lung full and closed his eyes to breathe deeper. The scent shifted with his eyes closed until the air smelled like his mother – in liquid form. Until each sound shifted and each firework, each laugh and awe muffled echoically, submerged, within a world underwater.

 

A fuse lit beneath a new mortar and…

 

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHTPOP

 

…eyes open, and following, following, following, the amber ascending quick and watching as fast as he could; slower now silenced into the third POP. 

 

Stop.

 

For that moment imagine this shadow fly contrasted against a now pitch night sky hesitating – suspended in a leap of faith and waiting it’s inevitable expansion amidst the void like some galactic taraxacum frozen in a pose in which apomixis is paused for introspection.

 

His eyes closed again – every sound spoke to him in the language of hidden distances where every cry is never guaranteed to return the echo. Where every scream, however, is guaranteed to sound like a secret being buried in a pillow. And with his lungs re-acclimating to respiring fluid; eyes closed with a glow the way wax illuminates outward the fire within – he is guaranteed a screaming choir cacophonous in the hidden distances where his every cry is guaranteed to go silenced, without reciprocation, without echo – for he is her fire and she his wax..

 

Eyes up and poised through the still grey cloud memory still redolent in form of the fireworks prior and pausing again…

 

Sprawling slowly to open a collapsed Promethean fist reaching instead with his palm to embrace us all and opening slower; slower now…

Two.

Slower still and emerging in a low tone whisper with an accent regional only to the Planck Epoch and the sounding of vocal folds formed from the collision of glaciers – echoing through eons of light years and years and years yawning in a panoptic gaping sky-lengthed maw.

 

“Maxwell,” it spoke (though speaking wasn’t the right word, more – it’s simply conveyed. Moreover Maxwell simply inferred; the way the mouth conveys fear unanimously the same way regardless of the language speaks). 

 

“Each stitch and instant, pitch and object, twitch and experience encountered, manifested, phenomenalized unanimously contains with in its essence the vestige of the Planck Epoch. Regardless of the acceptance for or the rejection of this claim is in no way different for to experience either is to experience the other.”

 

Eyes down, closed now – “I am the flame within” Maxwell thought, more, without any basis for spoken language he simply felt, “the wax of my mother.“

 

He kicked.

 

“Silenced” he inferred, “without an echo, a screaming fire buried within a sacred being and suspended against a now pitch night,” keeping his eyes closed to breathe and feeling himself drunk on liquor amnii, “I am the fuse lit beneath a world underwater.”

 

Eyes closed, the mother warmth of womb enveloping him and yet from within, he hears a voice now echoing off of her diaphragm. It spoke again – shot – from the Epoch, “Maxwell,” in and intimated whisper, “here is also neither separate from neither firework nor Epoch nor distant from eyes either open or closed. This is what you have named ‘The Simultaneous Birthing’ what you have felt as slight tears or tears in your whisper… Maxwell, are you ready? The consequence of all of this…” is silenced into the fourth

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHTPOP

 

Stop.

Eyes startled open and downward – a trailing fire tailing beneath him like an umbilical chord to the river below he froze – fetal – soft now, peace. “For that moment,” it continued, now even with his eyes and heart open, lungs open to air, the voice became endemic to each of Maxwell’s senses, “you’ve become yourself enwombed and suspended against a now pitch night – are you ready? As cause and effect are a single occurrence – all of this ends in the self unspirling now… Maxwell… Unspiral…“

 

Three.

 

If a spiral were to uncoil – imagine first it becoming a straight line…

Maxwell poised in purposeful Tadasana and extended, stretched across an impossibly straight path from Planck’s Epoch to this moment, the moment when and where you are reading this, to the right now instant where this is being read to you. 

 

“All are the single pathway to cosmic conception.”

 

He thought of the timelessly accurate pathway through All That Is when the voice whispered, “this is what you have named ‘Tadasanall.’“

 

Imagine second the backwards recoil where to unspiral is to spiral again back within (a distance and shape the human form is not built to withstand) and knowing (more intuited via the vox semperviva) eyes closed and “breathe Maxwell, swallow with your lungs.” In that instant what once smelled maternal turned eternal in a collection of unfamiliar scattered stimuli, “this is what you have named ‘Time’s Scentuary,’” Maxwell gleaned. 

 

And now, stopping again – the sensual pull of his elastic self esemplastic to the universe.

Stretching thin the pull string run slack.

Apexed.

Expired.

Strengthless in the conviction of pulling again, back, pulling farther until peaked… 

 

“Maxwell, I’m going to let go now… Don’t hold on… Don’t prepare… Just let go…” It spoke clearly now, “LET GO!“

 

And starting off with a sonic booming self Maxwell traversed eons in moments. As abruptly as the geyser cause of his travels turned the river to rainfall he paused first to listen to the core of earth and second, pausing longer still, to become centered in the Pangea equivalent of the Milky Way Galaxy, “no time, only void,” he’d thought, “no space, only Self. Unspiraled, recoiled in a mass of broken particles vast and sifting out of existence” until he, Maxwell (motionless and without form) now knowing only the Epoch; he has become nameless.

He has become a creature without the penance of history. 

 

Knowing no self, knowing not even the void – scattered like pointillism into vanishing.

Detritus no more.

No trace of universe.

 

Nothing.

 

Void. 

 

Pitch.

 

Darkness.

 

Maxwell focused out of existence and only Self remained steady.

Here in the impossibly compact void – the Planck Epoch now only moments away now silenced by the first

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHTPOP

Stop….

 

“Maxwell,” it spoke, “are you ready?“

Prometheus Modernized; Rosa Parks as Grand Theft Deity.

Scott Jones,

Two Sundays ago we sat expounding poetic waxings in my living room and while we spoke on a range of varied topics there was one specifically that stood out to me; the idea of modernizing gods and mythos. A week later I had the inspiration of Paul Ekman, with all of his faces, being some form of a modernized Janus and this morning I had the inspiration of something far more intense.

As you know Sunday, March 7th, 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march marked as Bloody Sunday. This morning Amanda and I were catching up on last night’s Daily Show and both of us were really quite moved by the interview with congressman John Lewis.

While Lewis spoke of his time as a youth in the south and shared the stories of meeting Dr. Martin Luther King jr. and Rosa Parks I was struck, overcome, confounded by a poetic feeling that truly confused my senses as if I was truly being inspired in the sense of this poem appeared to literally be breathed (spired) into (in-) me from elsewhere and I knew this woman…

http://www.biography.com/people/rosa-parks-9433715/videos/rosa-parks-legacy-15821379604

…must be our Prometheus.
Rosa Parks; Prometheus Modernized.

And she reaches a black hand
through the ash and grasps
the roots and trunk of a centuries
aged olive tree; bent at hips
and tree tip to flame ignites
the leaves and branches –

now fire as foliage and raising
the torch of a colossal olive
branch she twists into a flaming
centrifugal force and hurricanes
the gods approaching, the gods
closing in, falling in – she spins.

Her fists clasping the whirling bark
and branch of an enkindled
and coruscating olive tree; she
vortexes a capital H-E-R
HERicane collapsing concentric,
conflagration, circles of gods in piles at her feet.

Grand Theft Deity…

She dives from Olympus terminal
velocity unheard, blurred
and muffled by her sonic booms.
Careening back, cratering the Alabama
Earth beneath her feet and sits…
She keeps the fire     safe.

She hides the flames in her
resting feet. Tinder
and kindling a blaze within
her heart
febrifuged beneath her
bobby pinned hat and whispers…

“All people have
earned their grip
upon this torch.”

And straightening herself
her posture as perfect,
as confident, as the human
form is built for she knows
so from, and for, bones
and muscles are the tools

that straighten her spine.
Knowing only sinews
and joints thrust chins
upward; knowing the
blades beneath her skin
pull back her shoulders.

Knowing only vertebrae
that turns her head;
knowing only lateral
and superior rectus
muscles to be turning
her eyes – to meet his.

And knowing – it is the
brachioradialis muscle
that forms his fists;
knowing his vocal cords
and tongue are what
forms his mouth to say…

“Get up… Get up now…
Get to the back 
of the fucking bus NOW!.”

Her eyes close a composed
moment and resting blink
she knows his skin color
did not clench those teeth and fists;
she knows her skin color
did not part her lips; the fire her skin

encases is what breathed
(deeper than the reflection
of facing mirrors)
and respired breathless
into the blazing, historically
echoing inferno, that spoke…

“No.”

Poem on his birthday…

Dear Brother,

Seven years? Is that right? Today is your birthday to turn 35 and you’ve been gone for 7 of those years now. I remembered that silly poem I wrote for you the year after you died – I shared it with few people and was happy when it came to mind yesterday talking to Amanda. Everything is still good here, things seem well with Chad; I think you would love my fiancé; I have a great career that I worked hard for – you’d be proud of everything. Happy birthday.

March 1st and the underneath
of beneath the grounds is a’rumblin.
Benjamin stirs in his made-for-a-Jew
coffin twixt two trees and a road.
Arise brother dear a rise!
From the zombified dirt and goth wounds
of the too many girls that will cry
and bleed over your grave tonight.

Shake them their maudlin pathos
and reach an ashy hand
from your cremation-tin-can
horror movie style with a half bent finger
and please – flip them the bird.
Happy Birthday is the word on your seventh birthday
elsewhere, celebratin’ with the Ghosts
and drinkin’ down your spirits.

For tonight I shall drink down your spirits,
with 2 shot glasses double fisting
some Moodswing Whiskey stumbling
over the upside down shovels
that I’ll use as stilts, like a Scared Crow
wobbling through the graveyard
my drunk fists’ll be dirty
from the digging up and digging down with you.

March 1st and the underneath
of beneath the skies is a’fumblin’
through blue hues of drug dazed
and hands balled at our chests.
Benjamin breaks loose the stitches
and vomits embalming fluids
burns off the doll suit and cuts loose
with a scream and dances the Skeleton Dance.

Owls hoot and the wind wails
as dust upturns from the foot stomping
of Zombies in their birthday suits.
Eating the cake of headstones,
getting stoned and boozed from graveleft libations
cawing into the night an Izibongo
of spirit guides while gliding into the shadows
to be seen only from the corners of our eyes.

Happy Day to the dead
and happy is our dead this day
for Benjamin turns whatever age his
ageless soul lets him; and since I still
have life left in me to breathe,
I’m blowing out the candles for you all.

My Lisp’s Mistress…

Amanda,

According to pediatricians, when I was much younger, there was a problem with my tongue; the frenulum was “far too short” and just, “had to be cut,” so that later in life I would speak like a normal person…

So then – as a teenager with impacted wisdom teeth about to go in for surgical removal, the doctors decided, “yes, this should be a fine time indeed to get rid of that pesky frenulum.” After surgery… Well… I’m sure you can imagine – 4 teeth pulled and a piece of my tongue removed.

Of the few people that notice that I do have a slight lisp with my voiceless dental sibilants (in particular the letter ‘s’) you not only did not make a joke of it but instead showed me how much you loved it. Every /s/ I spoke seemed to pour out of my mouth and into some aural erogenous zone that would elicit from you some kinetic necessity to reach out and kiss me. You are the mistress to my lisp…

My Lisp’s Mistress
    For Amanda Blair

Her fingers skim the skin
of my jaw she says,
“something in your smile,
some – thing perhaps – slid
from your tongue?”
She focuses, indexing
the sulcus of my
chin and says, “some
unveiled vestige of
Phoenician history –
a sin passed when
unused, unpoured
forth from that soft
palate,” her thumb
tip traces incisivus
superioris fastening
phalanx with philtrum
sealing orbicularis oris
to colonize my alveolar
ridge she sighs, “mine!
My salix lips –
my sibilant hush,
my lips-sentry
of Semitic shin,
polydeuces of Greek
Sigma and San as
unspeakable siblings,”
she presses sedulous,
against my pursed mouth
leaning into my cheek,
collapsing into a respiring
command, and whispers,
“I want to hear you hiss…”