Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Deficit Attention Disorder

This is my second poem in the first Perspectives, Poetry Concerning Autism and Other Disabilities Anthology.

www.perspectivesanthology.com

www.localgemspoetrypress.com
 
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You say I have a disorder that constitutes a deficit of attention,
I appear, unable to stare,
for countless hours
forcing my focus on the frivolous frustrating formulas floundering before me,
on the black board.
Can’t do it without, shaking the leg,
bobbing the head,
looking around aimlessly,
My disorder constitutes a deficit of attention?
Perhaps the deficit is in what you would have me be paying attention to?
Biologically speaking,
omnivores have carnivorous tendencies,
like a cat shoots after a mouse

or a mole,
or a bird,
darting by faster than eyes can register.
What if those adolescent young men who make up the majority of the diagnosed
are just in conflict with their

personal primal personas?
Calling them beyond the classroom window into the no longer existing wild,
itching to move,
run,
chase and catch the quarry fleeing before them.
The leg, shaking,
the head, bobbing,
body moving,

the pent up, unused energy nature intended for us to use to spring out,
obtain and bring back our catch to the clan.
Your contradicting class room etiquette,

rules designed for simplicity of the structure rather than the welfare of the students is no match for mother nature.
And mother nature tells me,
I want to be outside…
That the answer is out there!


Not on your blackboard.

That’s one possibility, for the lack of attention.
Maybe…it’s your boring monotone,
your pitiful pedantic postulations presuming to judge a mind
on a number
that has lost our interest.
Or the fact you have us memorizing minute miniscule details
micro and macro
learning not for knowledge sake,
but to not fudge the statistics
on the tests decreed to be handed down to us by who gives a crap from

who the heck even knows land?
Now that,

could lose anyone’s interest.
But of course, that’s where our focus should be right?
not outside, at why the temperature is changing,
or looking at the oil spills.
Not at the billions
going hungry,
or the countless people below the poverty line, right here in our backyards.
Not at the fact that more than two and a half million people are incarcerated in the land
of the free,
Or that people are too afraid of lawsuits to help each other in the home
of the brave,
Not at the hunger or hatred,
the unemployment,
the pollution,

or the war.
Not at everything happening right here, right now, under our noses,
all of it going by, unnoticed and ignored,

for staring at the board 8 hours a day,
or at the computer screens in the cubicles, focused in on a single solitary
task with all the focus in the world,
ignorant of what’s going on out there in the real world,
and we,

the ones with A.D.D.
are the ones not paying attention?
You say, I have a disorder constituting a deficit of attention.
Well, maybe, just maybe
the deficit, is in what you would have me, be paying attention to.




 

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