pollack

The Similarities

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

between you both are more Picasso
Pollack than Leibovitz     however
much I disengage    the Oculus will never
be Pennsylvania    though I have advanced
technology in my pocket    (I still have
the broken faces we captured)  I seek
the thin thread between real   what
I wish to be real   where I want to go
if time ever bends into black hole
I’ll head back home to Ohio and give
a hug to everyone    I somehow love
as an alarm    or Chekhov’s gun
telling   you are the people I still love
in the future you will reassemble into
magazine collage   and still resemble
the hummus-stained server in 2012

 

(originally published in Bindweed Magazine, Winter 2020)

Fake Pollack

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Acrylic in my head paints on canvas a monstrosity
the glut of guitars plucked and discordant my ganglia
a jumbled mess of math wrong equating crystals and string

circus a battle with the world its perspective a plane upside-
down on the runway screaming into sky oh I love who I love
and that’s the mallet rolling down the xylophone until the rot

an explosion at the end with upright bass scaling up
intensity while the sine waves crash against the shore
to counter the tide tolling against the whistling sand

 

(originally published in The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Winter 2020)