As a writer I have at times gotten away from what poetry should be, simplistic. Prose has made brief appearances in my poems, which although sometimes not a bad thing, can be a bit of a distraction. As a result, I have had to go back to the basics. I have been reading Shel Silverstein to refamiliarize myself with the beauty of the simple thought, the simple story.

I have found a great sense of reward in my attempt to return to metaphors and slant rhymes. Part of my poetic rebirth is my new found love for micro fiction. Essentially many of the “poems” I was writing were in fact works of micro fiction. I thoroughly enjoy the concept of telling a story in just a few hundred words, as is the case with micro fiction in prose and with poetry in verse, but it is important for me artistically to maintain a distance between the two.

Perhaps, this moment in my journey as a writer is an epiphany, perhaps the early stages of a manifesto. Perhaps this is nothing more than a continualization of a writer 3who has figured something out that is not such a mystery in the first place.

Middle Poetry

She is the love lake

Resurrecting the fire escape

Of my foundation

Allowing a resounding

Renunciation

Of drama

She walks on the pillows of histories

Clouds

As our beings continue to combine

In Buddhist

Time

Reincarnating

Discussions of future

Juggling schedules

Like children juggling marbles

She was there then

First crush

First kiss

First touch

First sex

She is all those women

Times 7

Holding hands through infinity

On the city street

Coming and going

But never leaving

Like elementary school kids

With their incessant teasing

Pleasing the telepathy of thoughts

Undiscovered

Crumbling

Berlin walls

Bringing forth

Democracies

Role reversal

She makes me feel feminine

Makes me say

“Don’t stop”

Makes me beg for more

An oasis in dehydration’s desert

Quenching

Saturating

Infiltrating

The posturing of insecurity

Nomadic

Woman

Mixing the breaks

With the beats of heart

Spinning

A soliloquy

The left-handed love child

Of Dickinson and prince

Baptizing sinful desires in holy elation

Traveling past the corner bodega to Saturn’s rings

Flying behind the breeze of Pegasus’ wings

Time may be borrowed

But that is okay

I’ll always remember this feeling

It

Will

Not

Go

Away

Will return in the morning like the sun

Leaving with the presence

Off her spiritual moon

Cosmic interlocking

In the shadows of these city streets

Time to do something Snazzy

Creating substance

http://magazine-abrilliantrecord.blogspot.com/2008/12/hello-my-name-is-aaron-brendan-jackson.html

I wish I were black

Can’t you tell?

Black is cool,

it’s chic, hip, in.

Oppression is very twenty-first century.

I wish I were white,

I wish my inside matched my outside,

my passion for equality would be seen as admirable.

I have always wanted to be rich like white people,

to be innocent like white people.

I wish I were an Asian woman.

To live with every guy of every color,

longing to bag me, the exotic beauty.

I would give massages and bend to their every whim,

it is the Asian woman’s duty to serve.

I wish I were gay,

being gay would be absolutely fabulous.

I would have better fashion sense and constant sex.

All day long I would chase after straight men,

that’s what a gay guy does.

I wish I were Latino,

as a Latino I would eat great food.

I could dance up a storm,

be en fuego in bed,

no man can compare to the Latin lover.

I wish I were a foreigner,

than I could laugh at American ignorance.

Jersey City Poet Laureate Plaque