Poetry by Paul Jackson

               ​Martin Cathrae CC



Survivor Part 1

1983 
The year of the unkind fist.

I was the Trailer Park Kid
Living from tree fort to tree fort.
Dodging my buddy’s older brother,
Boo, whose bucked toothed sneer
Was usually followed by a beating.

I was rust colored corduroy
And a bowl cut.

I was He-man and Gobots,
Birthday cake in the front yard.

The world felt so distant,
But some truth sucks
At playing hide and seek. 

And we sucked at hiding 
The truth that our little trailer
Housed a hurricane 
Nestled in my father’s clenched fist.

And how he danced his hand
Across my mothers courageous chin,
Upturned saying
“Go ahead mother fucker,
I can take it.”

And how this one moment,
Definitely not the last one,
But this one replayed itself
Like a crashing song on repeat. 
A knuckle loop jaw line dance
My heart skipping terrified beats 
A scared little kid
The last one standing in this 
Cacophony of abusive musical chairs.

I can’t tell you how many words 
I’ve written in an attempt 
To pull the meaning from what I saw. 
All the choked blood and broken teeth in the words.
The language pulled out of the vein
The dictionary of a still beating heart 
Saying I love you and
I’m still here and 
Can’t you see me?

Sometimes being a survivor 
And bearing witness are so similar,
Twin sisters sharing misery
With everyone within the blast radius.

Sometimes being a survivor
Is more than the pithy statements
Carved into the backs of the living.

Sometimes being a survivor 
Is looking at your own children
And finding love somewhere
So deep and so wide
That you can toss all of those old memories in
And hope they drown.

Sometimes being a survivor is
Accepting that the part of you that died that day
Will never come back.
Some part of me will always be
1983
The Trailer Park Kid.
A part of me will never be more than a child
My heart will always see things 
Through a child’s eyes
And that makes it so hard sometimes.
But
I survived.




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Survivor Part 2

1983
My favorite superhero is the Hulk.
I had been known to strip down to my underwear 
And growl at the elderly neighbors 
Flexing my child muscles.
Intoning in what was probably 
A comical Cookie Monster voice
That I am the Hulk.

What they didn’t know is that
I too have survived monsters.

I survived colliding voices
The wet sound of an open hand 
Across a defiant cheek
The thunder of broken teeth
Twinkling red porcelain chips
In the bathroom sink.
The sound that hair makes
When it’s ripped away from the scalp
Like a child pulled from its mothers reach.

I lived with monsters.
Then, when I crawled out of my skin
And stared at a life 
That stretched like an empty hallway
I, too, became a monster.

No amount of growling
Made it hurt less.

I was surrounded by pain
And hatred
The son of the monster
The son of the nightmare 
That jolted my mother from the few 
Fleeting hours of sleep she could muster 
Between shifts and second and third jobs.
The four horsemen of poverty, hunger, loneliness, and grief
Galloped by my bedside each morning
When I rose to start the day. 

The leering faces of addictions 
And regrets
And a worthlessness that cradled my head when I ended the day alone
Or empty
Or sad. 

But here’s the twist

I never hated them enough to
Not love them
I never hated them at all.

All I ever wanted was to be told
That the monsters weren’t real
But we know the truth. 

Now that the monster that never stayed
Beneath my bed
Has been laid beneath the ground
And I see his face in 
Every mirror 
And in the eyes of my children 
I only feel love 
And grief 
And I miss him often.

We are so much more
Than every mistake we’ve ever made
And surviving is
More than making it out alive
It’s found in our ability to find grace
In forgiveness.

I still roar sometimes 
It’s my way of saying hi old man
I miss you.



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Paul Jackson is a lover and a fighter, hustling misery and poems out the backseat of a broken heart in Phoenixville, PA. He’s been conducting these verbal autopsies for the last 30 years in the quiet comfort of his own home, but now has decided to release them into the wild void.
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