POETRY
I always wrote poetry, now more than ever. I’ve been published in several journals and websites and won an honorary mention In the Arizona Literary Review.
Moonlight is her light.
It seems it must have always been.
It decorates her with a sheen so bright
That it seems good to sin.
That’s a fragment of a lost poem given back to me by my brother who remembered…What a gift.
Three poems published on June 18, 2014 on Columbia Journalism’s Catch & Release:
3 Poems by Merilyn Jackson
Haboob
The possible ranks higher than the actual.
—Martin Heidegger
Tout de même
the desideratum of
the golden glove,
the idiocy of my love—
our love, were it to occur—
the song of it echoing across bridges,
between banks of river gorges,
carried along in barges, aloft sine waves,
tunneling through mountains,
plummeting down canyons for millennia,
bruising grasslands
and
burrowing into all the libraries of the world
forgotten about through the ages,
unearthed by sages to deride and malign
and yet marvel—
marvel at our dasein.
Empty Spaces
It’s in the emptiest of spaces
that I am most with you
and you with me…
That long moment that erases
the memory of
each other’s faces.
The time our voices are forgotten
our touches unbegotten.
There the whispers.
There the shadows.
There the shudders’ final traces.
Where the kisses?
Where the love bites?
Where the hot, stormy embraces?
If only you would come to me
there, in those empty spaces
you would fill the moon
in all its gloomy phases.
You would fill it with silly questions:
Why do women want to be blonde?
I hate Doris Day, don’t you?
You, the fixed, sardonic sign,
inspirer of my fire,
groom your mystique,
defend your lair.
Better Beans and Bacon
in peace.
Because thou art so virtuous
you give rise to my defeat.
The umbra of the moon,
like virga that does not reach
the earth in Arizona,
does not darken radiant Gemini.
For even on twelfth night
she remains pale,
eating your words
like Cakes and Ale.
Words
Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
—Hegel
When word does not become flesh
I settle only for your words.
Sparse as they are,
they fill my being if not my belly—
keep me from starving…
That long moment that erases
the memory of
each other’s faces.
The time our voices are forgotten
our touches unbegotten.
There the whispers.
There the shadows.
There the shudders’ final traces.
Where the kisses?
Where the love bites?
Where the hot, stormy embraces?
If only you would come to me
there, in those empty spaces
you would fill the moon
in all its gloomy phases.
You would fill it with silly questions:
Why do women want to be blonde?
I hate Doris Day, don’t you?
You, the fixed, sardonic sign,
inspirer of my fire,
groom your mystique,
defend your lair.
Better Beans and Bacon
in peace.
Because thou art so virtuous
you give rise to my defeat.
The umbra of the moon,
like virga that does not reach
the earth in Arizona,
does not darken radiant Gemini.
For even on twelfth night
she remains pale,
eating your words
like Cakes and Ale.
Read more: http://columbiajournal.org/3-poems-by-merilyn-jackson/
And here are some poems published in Andrei Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse and in Broad Street Review:
Two poems by Merilyn Jackson
The First Quatrains For Patrizia Valduga, Con Amore
O Woodsman, You Know Me
http://www.corpse.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=764&Itemid=99999999
http://www.corpse.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=695&Itemid=32
http://www.broadstreetreview.com/index.php/main/article/my_two_weeks_at_summer_poetry_workshops
HNY 2013 to Philadelphians Near and Far, and to those who love us, wherever you are:
9 p.m., Two Street, New Year’s 2013
Pinched from behind,
I turn in protest to a tall greenfaced man
in chartreuse satin dress and gold braids
smiling down at me, Sorry, Happy New Year.
Threading through the thickening crowd,
the cop I bump into holds onto his coffee.
He smiles, his teeth luminous inside his black skin.
Oh sorry, did I make you spill ? Nah, Happy New Year.
I climb aboard a slatted flatbed truck
searching through the trombones for Danny.
Is this New Sound Brass Band? Nope.
My gloved hand between the slats grasping his, Happy New Year, anyway.
The truck lumbers forward —
Falling me backwards into the arms of a young man in drag
I’m looking for my grandson’s band, I say
Wow, you’re awesome, kissing my cheek, Happy New Year.
There’s David, a face in the throng recognized,
a face to push through to, to shout to,
to dance a little ring around on the sidewalk
with hugs and Happy New Year.
Among the men in green dresses
the brasses blast down the street
there’s one in gold, it’s Danny.
I grope through to kiss him, Happy New Year.
Along the wall of the school where children return today
a Wench unzips, pulls it out, takes a whizz.
A few feet away, a couple is macking
blissfully unaware of his steam, his swaying.
Strutting through a sea of crushed beer cans,
not drunk like their drinkers, these Mummers,
just drunk on their happiness,
strutting along in our orgy of hope.
Here’s a very old one:
The Poetry Shop
Nose pressed
against the cold pane,
eyeing delicacies,
dreading my dreary everyday fare,
and you come
to take me inside.
I do not know you
but I let you buy me sonnet tarts
creamy ballads, saccharine rhymes.
You smile as I devour dessert
the last mille-feuille haiku —
such a contradiction.
In a cut glass bowl
on the marble counter,
verses of every color cavort.
I stuff some
in my pockets
for after I’ve tasted your honeyed lips.
Merilyn Jackson 1992
When I was in Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Balakian’s poetry workshop in 2012, he said this poem was a “medieval curse” poem:
Pater Noster
Our Father which art on top of me
Shallow be thy name
Thy thingdom come
Thy will be done
On this cot as it
Is in thy bed
Give us this day our daily head
And forgive us our hall passes
As we forgive those who trash us
lead us into temptation
and deliver us unto evil
For thine is the thingdom
The power and the cassock
Black and crushing
Your girth upon
A five year old child
Your crucifix impresses
its tat on her back.
Come look – A miracle –
you pious Cossack.
Why suffer little children
Unto you?
so small and so cute
so easily frightened mute
If you go this far
Why not also murders?
Why leave these witnesses
You witless fuckers?
How long will they stay quiet?
You’re betting, who would ever buy it?
Who believes their sinful tales
Calms their pathetic wails
How many little bodies
buried in your rectories
Your semen in their rectums
or bloodied by your thumb?
Imagine the Holy Orders
You gave those kids
Along with drugs
And Illicit hugs
In your darkest quarters
Why are we not digging in your cellars?
Why, the paper said just today
Your parishioners say
“It’s sensitive. We just stay out”
You make the Cardinal rules
You move your pastors
From parish to parish
Making of your congregants fools
They live in Bishopricks
Where you can’t get a jury
That isn’t so well hung
as pederast clerics
The foreman stuck in foreplay
The grooming game begins long
Before the foreskin can be sucked
Before the buttocks are displayed.
You teach the kids their Catechism
which they recite while drooling your gism
they grow up nihilistic
rejecting all that is Eucharistic.
And there you sit with your votaries
Aiming your trajectory
A rainbow’s spectrum
Of Holy Cum
Merilyn Jackson 2012