maple by brett a. maddux is a collection of poems written in pen on maple avenue in hartford, connecticut from march 2021 to august 2022.
Written & Photographed by
brett a. maddux
maple was written during a four year period of complete personal solitude, without any material possessions and disconnected from the internet. Read "spectral lines,""good old chuck" and "whole inside of everything" from maple below.
spectral lines
when writing in the spectral lines, this one is love & it does echo,
sitting down & counting elements, christmas morning as it’s
snowing, surrounded by a lot of molecules & entirely alone unless
you count the holy ghost, i guess, depending how you frame
attendance. i have two slits that let the light in, the wavelengths
crash into perception, i think that i can see these colors, i believe
that there is time & a few other illusions that they sold to us as
children, first came one & then came zero, first there is order then
there’s entropy, first there is something then there’s nothing, neither
created nor destroyed, i guess, everything in ebb & flow, first
comes silence then serenity i bring you greetings from the alley cats
hovering beneath reality, ascending to the first dimension where
everything is kind of linear, first i’m a point then i’m a line & i can
split like an infinitive, if you need it you can have it, at least i think
that’s what the plan is, the things you notice when you look for
them, the things you hear if you just listen. knowing that i do not
exist which means i have the super power of understanding that i
am already dead, this one will fold into geometry & can conceive of
pure mathematics, this one knows better than to laugh when god
starts up with that old joke again who’d sell his soul for a little
power who’d sit alone & count the hours, who could really tell the
difference, snow still falling, the day quiet, a lighter i keep in my
pocket for setting fire to the poisons i’ve been taking, levitating in
the frame & floating out into the ether, later i will call my sister &
we will speak about existence just like children often do when
peering down into the river.
good old chuck
he said my name is good old chuck & i can look you in the eye, boy
& let me ask you, have you got two quarters. i got acid reflux & i’m
trying to buy some aspirin i said my name is brett & it’s nice to
meet you & all i’ve got are keys to my apartment which is one
block away but in that apartment i have aspirin if you want some.
he said that would be perfect & so we walked together to get it.
i asked him how long he’d had the acid reflux & he said it’d been a
long time that he was seventy-two but that he’d had it for as long as
he could remember a long time now, a long time & then he told an
anecdote & in it he mentioned his kids. i asked about his kids. he
told me about them, said the oldest one was named after him, that
he loved his son but that he was as hard-headed as him & as
stubborn & they didn’t always see eye to eye but they shared a
name so it was bigger than that. at this point we reached the
apartment & i was considering what he had said. i said so his name
is chuck too. he said why did you just call me chuck. no one calls
me chuck. i never told you my name was chuck & so i thought about
what he had said before, which stood real & vivid in my mind
my name is good old chuck & i can look you in the eye, boy &
i thought about the nature of the past & how anyone can see it
however they want to see it, so his version is as real as mine,
& for a moment i considered that maybe he had never said good old
chuck maybe it had drifted in from somewhere else, some other life,
maybe i had just perceived it, maybe it was an impression in my
own mind that was not rooted in reality. so i said do you go by
charles & he said yes, i go by charles & i said so your son is charles
too & he said yeah, but he goes by chuck & i know why he does it
too. & it just he cut off then & stared out into the distance, lost in a
reverie. i was not sure then what part of this was real & what was
just the dream so i stood there for a moment to see if there was
anything more i was supposed to hear. there wasn’t. he said i’m
charles, it’s been nice to meet you brett & i said charles, it has been
a real pleasure & then i gave him the aspirin.
whole inside of everything
i wrote this one high on ubik but when i read it i’ll be sober
yes they siphon all the juices & give off a falser glitter
with a casual serenity as when counting up my breath.
suppose in this one i reflect just as a mirror does, subliminal,
almost at the level of the light as it courses through the
canopy, i am a monkey in the end with lots of clever little
prophecies, if i am whole within my self then i am whole
inside of everything. i wrote this one in a trance down the road
from an old graveyard, in my body there’s the dusk & i am
floating in-between the stations of that cosmic radio, playing
on every different frequency, i can hear them in the quiet.
suppose in this one i refract just as a prism does, spiritual,
spread across a couple of dimensions, i am a universe in the
end with lots of sensory delusions, when at last i know i’m
nothing then i am whole inside of everything.