Jackson Steel: Poems

An Artist's Brain is Like a Sticky Frying Pan

Jackson Steel Feb 2022

An Artist's Brain is Like a Sticky Frying Pan

It used to be a non-stick pan.
But then came usage. Wear and tear,
The scratches from a fork that you use to test the temperature of your spaghetti stack up.
Eventually you have the whites of eggs,
The sauce from beans and the crackling from pork crackling hugging the thing.
**** you don’t need, **** that no one wants,
**** that can’t be organized into anything but drain food without some major legwork.
Now imagine an occupation in which this non-stick-frying-pan-reorganisation-legwork was all that was needed to get a cheque.
And artists wonder why they can’t turn a cent.

Doors

Jackson Steel Feb 2022

Doors

Doors
Doors
Doors
What if ******….
Everything was a door. David is a door, Kalo is a door, I’m a door, the weather is a door, Aldi’s 75p pizza is a door. And what if all those doors are open all at the same time or, better yet, if you had no control over which doors are open or slammed shut at any given moment.
Your mind is just one big hectic corridor with spooky Escherian architecture and being creative is like playing a straining game of Twister down this twisty bit of brain fiber.
You can’t explore in one room for too long because another interesting door is flung open that you simply must enter. Moments pass and when you poke your head through the second door the prior one is already closed tight.
What if relationships were doors? Some of the rooms look very appealing but they're too big, too vast and too mysterious. You can’t wander through these rooms very far or the lights may go out and you lose your way or maybe the doors slam shut behind you and you can’t get out of the locked and lightless room.
What if you could manipulate the rooms in this corridor of madness? If two doors are so close to each other why not make a merger of equals? Collapse the **** thing in on itself and have each of them make way for the same large room. What if two rooms look remarkably similar but are too far apart in distance? Or right next to each other in distance but polar opposites in content? Who’s going to organize this place and how do you alphabetize every aspect of everything?
How do you make sure you don’t accidentally eat your own foot?

Drowning in Pride

Jackson Steel Feb 2019

Drowning in Pride

Hastily, suddenly,
plunging oars down in the pale sea.

Glistening, expecting,
his eyes shined anticipating.

Bleached pale clear, shining near,
jewellery sitting heavenly here.

Can’t go back, t’face attack,
waves outnumber the stars in the track.

Bigger ships, faster ships,
displaying greater workmanship

Begin to shrink, as anchors sink,
they look like grains of sand in a blink.

Storms go in, he thinks of his kin,
and anchors the boat, grazing his shin.

Reef, clovehitch, a bowline itch,
clutches his thumb like a tall stitch.

Abruptly, in agony,
he cuts his thumb so aimlessly.

Blood spills out, near the trout,
he jumps in the sea without any doubt.

Deeper down, fetching his crown,
he grabbed the pearl and screamed like a hound.

His heart did ache, in the great lake,
when he found out the orb was a fake.

Fear and Ignorance

Jackson Steel Nov 2019

Fear and Ignorance

Imagine a gaunt, scrawny, angular man naked on the side of rainy road; staring in utter bewilderment at the flood light of a parked car.

His eye brows curl up, his body shivers and his hands shake profusely.

A tall man gets out of the car with a long blanket and wraps it around the Angular Man. The latter clutches said blanket, grasping it with his bony hands and uncut nails, and, if you looked closely, you could see several layers of skin peeled off of his fingers from dampness of the weather.

The Angular Man had a bizarre face, a long nose that was both thin and wide in all the wrong places, orange-green eyes, dark brown hair with thin raspy lips.

The Tall Man helped The Angular Man into the car and calmed him down by telling him stories of the street's creation, ofcourse, he made them up then, there on the spot but that didm't seem to matter to the Angular Man whose face shifted from the bizarre one as mentioned before to one that looked much like the Tall Man sitting opposite him on the side of the rainy road, looking in utter conviction in the front seat of a parked car.

Heartache Houseplant

Jackson Steel Feb 2022

Heartache Houseplant

You sit it in a corner of your room
You water it, you feed it.
You change it’s soil after it ***** the nutrients from under the previous filth.
You are never bored of your houseplant.
You get bored of everything else but the plant is always constant, always routine.

Then one day you spot another houseplant
Sitting in the corner of the botanical garden
Or perhaps you find it online and meet to see it in person
On a window or shelf. Regardless of place it is always exhibiting itself to you.
The novelty strikes one like it isn’t a plant at all, but something much bigger.
You throw away the old and sit the new one in the same corner of your room.
You water it, you feed it.
You change it’s soil after it ***** the nutrients out of your own filth.

I'm so hungry and nothing tastes good

Jackson Steel Feb 2022

I'm so hungry and nothing tastes good

I’m so hungry and nothing tastes good
I’m so hungry and nothing tastes good

I eat a loaf of pavement with a pinch of gravel
I eat a pencil case like a baguette and shake the carvings into my mouth when the meaty stuff’s all gone
I like Double Decker wrappers most of all
Frighteningly chewy but any toilet worth its bath salt will tell you hydrochloric stomach acid will not unchewifiy its texture no matter how much it tries.
And it tries very hard.

I’m so hungry and I cannot sleep
I’m so hungry and I cannot sleep

Something about the hunger makes me want to ******* in the toilet
Perhaps by a window or leaning back against my unlocked bedroom door
Some sharp spikey pleasure to relieve the pain
It is not a sharp pain, nor a spikey one
It is a soft, malleable, liquid-y pain
What pains me about this pain is how it perseveres.
And it perseveres for quite a while.

I’m so hungry and i try too hard
I’m so hungry and i try too hard

Art is my food.
Art fills up my belly before i fall asleep
Art gets chewed and broken down like amino acids before running through my veins
When I exercise, go to my lectures, talk to my friends, it is the fruity juice of art that fuels my ligaments as they contract.
As long as this stupid ******* short film gets made
I will never have to eat anything proper ever again

I’m so hungry and it tastes so good
I’m so hungry and it tastes so good

None But The Lonely Hearts

Jackson Steel Nov 2019

None But The Lonely Hearts

The Patient, with one name after another branded, like a hot iron on the roof of his mind, roams around a lonely populus; continuously giving but being capable of receiving that which he gives.

It smites like a snout in the fog.

Difficult to make out but impossible to deny its existence. The snout becomes clearer as the mist fades away, the grey fur glows, and then, with one single ****** of motion the whole wolf appears itself with the dynamism of a lightning bolt striking violently. It refuses to remove itself from the Patient's view as it stands there stubbornly.

The Patient gestures, nudges, speaks and screams yet the Wolf's head can never, will never and, finally, should never, ever truly turn.

And so from the first chemical secreted in his brain till the last the Patient lives.

Scared.
Confused.
Unloved.
Unknown.

Alone.

#purgatory

Parysatis II

Jackson Steel Feb 2022

Parysatis II

Compliments have power.
Women have power.
A woman with a high compliment tendency may as well be Alexander the Great.
And she could compliment Alexander the Great into carving up his own empire too.
It doesn’t matter the woman.
She could be a five-hundred pound baboon that merely identifies as a woman.
But even if big-footess complimented a boy on his blue rimmed glasses that boy would wear those glasses to bed with him.
He’d pursue ophthalmology as a profession.
He’d build a blue rimmed shrine to big-footess in all her complimentary glory.
He’d die from the sun’s rays burning his skull as the twenty-seven blue-rimmed glasses he wore at all times magnified its rays, piercing them through his retina.

Patience

Jackson Steel Oct 2019

Patience

The kiss and the arrow; the Patient pondered.
Lying in litres of his own blood, wondering which, if either, had dug deeper in his heart.

Which of Us

Jackson Steel Nov 2019

Which of Us

Getting up to say something swiftly, his mind went blank and the thought left him.

Years later it came back as he was oiling his drone for the very last time in his long laborious life.

He asked the metal man, who was sitting on his own chains and awaiting eagerly by the Architect’s feet, which of us is in control, which of us is happy, which of us is enslaved.

And which of us is the robot.

— The End —