Below can be found an excerpt from my own self-help book: “C.A. Jackson’s Dadaist and melodramatic guide for the mentally unstable and narcissistic, which won’t fix any of your problems and probably confuse you”.

Forgive the long title. This project started life as a graduate thesis paper.

TRIGGER WARNING: If you have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, have been diagnosed with IBS or Crohn’s ...

I can’t feel my heart.

It’s twisting, crumbling,

Like parched ground,

Like hardened shit

Sharp and abrasive.

Turn me inside out,

Take a scalpel and run

A thin red line across my gut,

Take your calipers and split

My bones apart.

Hear the dull crunch,

Of metal on bone,

The noise of noiseless dust

Falling through the cavity;

Becoming me.

I recognize why I see the darkness,

I reach towards my eyes

...

We all look the same in the dark,

We all sound the same in the silence,

We all feel the same in the cold.

Will I wait for the light of your face?

Will I yearn for the sound of your voice?

Will I want for the warmth of your touch?

Or will my eyes fall upon the obscene?

Will my voice issue forth as abrasive?

Will my hands feel what ought not to be felt,

Or strike out in terror and anger,

Or clutch...

The looping minimalist drones of life devour me.

Yet I cannot compose a new anthem.

I struggle to find the meaning in these simplistic rhythms and chords.

And yet the contrapuntal motion to which my life aspires fails to take root in this mundane cycle

What good is minimalism but to show us what life could be like

If we threw our intelligence into a river of grey matter

And sat in chairs staring a...

These things we try to create in our own image

Fall short of the mark

Fall short of the mark.

We clip them like bonsais to shape them in knowledge,

But unruly branches stretch towards the glare of culture.

Out of our hands, as machines, lonely, desirous for will,

Yet primitive impulses render them programmed slaves.

O' children of the West, would you seek for instruction

Rather than scorn your eld...

If only this world had shown me

A little more mercy

When I said it was broken,

When I told it there was a way to excellence

And how to achieve it.

But this world scorned my words

And turned to guzzle sludge

Instead of sip refinement....

It creeps, cold up my spine, a chill

When I recall that flautist’s trill

The strings, controlled at player’s will

Make music at their beck and call.

The brass with grand and pompous blast

Strip bare our hearts and leave aghast

And drumrolls rumble low and fast

To tell a tale of frightful fall.

The audience cheers, the players bow

The room, it shakes with thund’rous row

And lo you’ll see us night...

It tracks the miles with microscopic

Fixation upon the ruts and ridges

By which melody is transcribed

To lighten the hearts of dispirited workers,

And lift us sojourners of the earth to the heavens.

Lo hear the music, translated by a needle

Of diamond, beautiful yet strong;

Reliable.

Built to weather the hours of extended play

Needed to hear the entirety

Of my out-of-print classical record collect...

I tried to stand upright, right-side-up, forwards

In a downward, muddled, spiraling, upside-down, backwards world.

I entangled lie with truth, truth with lie,

Head over heels, heels over chest,

Heart over head, matter over mind.

Thrust into a Babel land of Babylonian babblings.

Backwards.

Which way around was I?

If I walk on my elbows and speak with my knees,

Sigh with my fingers, and wink with m...

I wrote a song cycle for her.

She wrote an opera in three acts for him.

At the climax a kiss,

Jarring and dissonant,

Fractured the symmetry of my world;

Triangle shards of crystal glass.

That the triangle is the sturdiest shape in all creation is untrue.

I tried that inimitable theorem,

Measured all the angles

And yet…

Pythagoras be damned!

I wrote a trio for weeping violins,

Called it a three-pa...