Yawning is a symptom of adderall,
a strange side effect for a stimulant
but then so is staring at a wall
in thoughts just always out of reach
that lure one playfully into thinking
the way the Cheshire Cat entreats Alice
abandoning her to curiosity, disappearing
his limbs until all that remains
is a floating, catenary grin.
You’re not focused so much
as you’re inclined to be focused,
your catecholamine receptors flooded
with something masquerading as epinephrine
and dopamine. Euphoria is the absence
of distraction, the readiness that is all.
But being unaccustomed to happiness,
or overdoing it, one forgoes thinking
for feeling itself, and stares at a wall.
His mother tells me after our session ends
they doubled his dose from fifteen to thirty.
But I already knew that once he took out
the bottle halfway through his spelling list
pondering the lid like a valuable artefact
laughing at some invisible non sequitur.
At his age I’d seen two speech therapists
and sat at the same sort of table, wearing
the same bowl cut and sense of injustice
sometimes in action, always in thought.
But two hours is more than I can bear,
wading through worksheet after worksheet.
He doesn’t care what a pronoun is, and I don’t care.
Which isn’t the same thing as saying
neither of us likes a little learning.
There’s no greater pleasure in the world
than learning about it. I learned this too.
Hopefully he will, if he can think through
his mind stranded in Wonderland.
But when I tell him what a spyglass is,
stretching it out in my hands like a pirate,
we’re suddenly performing Peter Pan.
His eyes ungloss with fugitive black flags.
A half hour later the feeling fades.
Page eleven is the same as page ten.
His yawn inflates my own unsatisfying yawn,
a gasp that never inhales enough oxygen,
another symptom of the adderall.
You can’t find the end of a yawn or a thought.
R. Charboneau
Robert Charboneau. 