Written by AJ Luxton
My life is bought day by day with a medication
that raises my tolerance for gambling.
They say this is a "side effect" but for me
it's why the chemical is on my side.
It is risk to send a poem and risk to apply for an apartment
and my nervous system needs propulsion to jump the gap.
I think a lot about what it means
that volition is a pill I take a few times a day,
that volition is a steering control I tighten and loosen,
that such quantity—miracle!—inhabits a jar on my desk.
Am I a false mind for requiring a doctor's hand to activate me?
Am I a false mind because my brain would not say words if I did not string lights in it?
Was I real in the days when the lights stayed on by themselves,
or do none of us know we are robots?
.
AJ Luxton, B.S., M.F.A., autistic queer performance poet and certified bioethicist, is half of the interfaith art collective Faery Church and a tiny fraction of Los Angeles, and gently invites those who speak with certainty about sentience to examine their priors. Their poems have appeared in Abyss & Apex, Chronogram, Pop Fic Review, delicate emissions zine, multiple gallery exhibitions, and the Beyond Baroque stage. “Pramipexole” is from their manuscript seeking publication, The Larger Language Model: “poems about LLMs and smaller things, and most importantly how we are treating each other in a world shared with them.” Web: https://ajluxton.com | https://www.instagram.com/tesseractpoet | https://substack.com/@ajluxton