Hartford poet brett a. maddux releases his latest collection of poetry and photography titled american variation. The following is a selection of poems and photos from the collection written and photographed during a six month journey through North America.

Written & Photographed
by brett a. maddux

american variation was written in pen & photographed between march & september 2023 across the continent of north america on the planet earth. During that time the author spent six months sleeping in a car, taking long walks through natural landscapes, seeing friends & meeting strangers. A visual exploration of an external continent & a poetic exploration of the internal continent. Read six poems from american variation below.

reflections on utah

putting fuel in the machine so it can carry me through deserts,
peeking back behind the scheme where its recursive but not circular,
a series of descending steps that at the bottom you climb up again

& if my body is a fractal, if my mind’s a fractal too, if the tide shall
be defined by the effects of sun & moon & how their gravities pull
water, counting til i get to zero. putting thoughts inside my head

which then construct for me reality, knowing i’m already dead
& this is just a dream i’m having so i am making it a good one,
if the light shall be defined by both its presence & its absence,

both electric & in magnet, all these bodies casting shadows,
all expansion & contraction, all the loveliest of patterns,
all these universal laws forever dancing in the background.

setting my compass to the microwave, the spectrum playing
as a vision, looking out at the horizon seeing red becoming green
becoming blue.

you don't actually read this

i don’t actually write this, you just think that i do, if you tell yourself long enough
you start thinking it’s true, same with all hallucinations, same with transubstantiation
i am real if i tell myself i’m real.

you don’t actually see me, you just think that you do but i am just an apparition,
a visitor from some dimension that is similar to this one though with some changes
that are subtle, for instance in that one you love me though as i’ve mentioned not in this one
though i have learned the way to reckon, learned to transmute it into chemicals
& separate them with a magnet & then i sit & count the elements.

you don’t actually read this, you just think that you do & when you close your eyes
you can still hear this voice that is speaking inside you, oh yes that is me too
& we share the same i but don’t notice we do, oh yes now you can hear me,
yes i am coming in quite clearly on this level of the frequency.

left/right

i know my left heads the one reading but my right head picks out the books,
i know my left head speaks in language but my right can speak in looks
that will communicate my meaning, oh yes they operate in unity.

i know my left head writes the poems down but it’s my right head that is thinking them,
i know my left head says the poems out loud but it’s my right head that perceives them
as just ripples in a dream & i can tune into their frequency.

i know my left thinks there’s a word for it but my right knows that there isn’t,
i know my left head is the hero myth but my right head is the spirit
& they have come to an agreement.

i know my left head tells the story but it’s my right head that is staging it,
i know my left head thinks it’s real but my right knows it’s just an hallucination though
i experience it lucidly because my left head gives it narrative & includes me as a character.

i know my left head has this one life but my right head has had a few,
i know my left head thinks of time but it’s my right head that’s been howling at the moon & understanding
what she does to me, oh yes i know my left head loves me & that my right head loves me too.

portrait

if you’ll allow me to i’ll sing for you a song or two, for instance this one
where you’re living in the dream & where you know i’ve got the button
so you come over & push it & then the sky it just evaporates
& you have a talk with god & she says she will always love you
& then you wake up in the light.

if you’ll allow me to i’ll draw for you an afternoon, for instance this one
where you’re dressed in yellow sweaters & you know i could love you better
than anyone could ever do (except for you) & then you see that you can trust me
& so you put it in my hands & we both carry it a while.

if you’ll allow me to i’ll paint for you a portrait, for instance this one
where you’re smiling in the sun, your body laid upon a blanket,
a heaven any way you take it, one i am writing down in language
so you can live it in your memory.

if you’ll allow me to i’ll tell to you the ending, like how in this one
both our bodies turn to dust & all along we’ve the sensation
of one thing extending across time although i guess sometimes it stutters,
it puts its head under the covers & asks if you would like to cuddle.

these machines don't know shit

these machines don’t know shit but they can fake it cause they’re clever,
like a dog with one trick but that one trick is writing papers or delivering
payloads & we can’t tell the way it does it & so we say gee, ain’t that something

while behind it is a mainframe submerged in an ocean of water to keep it
from melting away & if you unplug it the dog can’t do the trick no more.
so that gets you started thinking how you can write papers too, no problem,

& for that your brain runs on the juice of just a lightbulb & you can do a lot
of other tricks & they tell me these machines are artificially intelligent
but they all mostly seem like idiots, all seem like artificial experts,

all seem like sales campaigns by rich kids, call me when one of them
can perceive a single moment of reality in all its many vibrant details,
call me when one of them has felt the thing that i felt when the person i loved

stopped loving me, call me when one of them has felt anything,
when one of them learns from personal experience &, having sampled of
the many earthly pleasures, renounces language & communicates in chemicals.

worship

i am a very old idea, one that’s expressed in ancient characters,
i’ve got some genes made for my alphabet, i’ve got some enzymes
for my words & i’m composed of protein paragraphs that tell the story

of my life. i am a loop tied from old string i am a very clever monkey
sending messages through music, same ones sent by all the others
although this is the way that mine sounds if you would only let me finish,

oh won’t you let me start again. i am a library of time, one built
on very strong foundations, a number chosen once at random,
a variation on a theme, one single particle of god who knows that

god is just a particle but she dresses in the light & for that men
are known to worship. i am a very old idea, i am a code that is recursive,
i’m one translation of the script, i am a law that’s universal written in

a sort of cursive before returning to the dust. i am a song that never ends,
i am one version of a couple, i am a source that does contain all of
its pasts & all its futures, just thought i might try living now,

just like the act of recollection works when waking from a dream
wait is this actually my body well if it’s not i guess i’ll wear it
til they put me in the next one.