Jack and the Beanstalk

Jack and the beanstalk.

Jack went out to sell a cow

Ended up high on some magical beans

High as a cloud

He never comes down

Jack the legend

Adventure video game hero slaying dragons

Staying one step ahead of the goblins chasing him

Collecting coins 

Doing somersaults off vines

Jack five years old on the streets of oakland watched his father get shot six times in the chest and one in the head.

Life was never the same again

Dad’s parents hated his mom so they hated him too.

Mom threw pans at his head when she was angry

Why was she so angry?

Why did she hate him so much?

Jack the big older brother, never let his younger brother know the pain he feels 

Always telling him stories from his imagination

Keep the childhood dream alive

Jack the poet, dreaming of broadway, listening to alicia keys

Jack the ripper, I wish I could slash the throats of the guys at school

Who shoved him against the wall

Put a nail gun to his head

And pulled the trigger

Jack gets all the girls

Hes the sensitive type

Jack and Jill went up the hill

Jack met me when I was nineteen, 

I was a scholarship student, no one’s ever hurt me before

Even all the boys in my school became MIT architects and doctors without borders

Kind men who believed in something

But all i wanted to do was listen to rock music 

And not go to class

And wear torn flannel shirts

my thighs were always on fire with puberty and sexual desire and endless potential

Everything everywhere was infinitely possible, do you know how much that hurts?

I couldn’t sleep because i thought i was going to die

I hated smoking pot and it made me panic but I couldn’t stop smoking it

Jack never spoke

Not to the other people in the house,

Just with my friend Anna when they went to smoke together

Jack the ripper is ripped she would say

When he wore a wifebeater

He’s shy but he finds me and talks to me

Sometimes hes at the gym

He always talks too much

Like he wants to run away

I never interrupt him

Jack asks me to smoke with him while we watch coraline

He asks me if I’m ok.

Hes the only one who has ever asked me if i’m ok

He takes me to the back yard

Its dark 

He says lets scream

He screams

But i’m too shy.

I don’t remember what happened in between

Then jack was carrying me back to my room in his arms

He puts me down on the bed

And he just looks at me

And he gets a piece of paper

He writes something down

He reads it to me:

Drip drip drip

Of the black ink of the clock

As time does bleed us

I think i found an angel tonight

No ones ever been kind to me

And i write back:

Total strangers

With nothing in common

Shouldn’t even know each other

But touch 

Just the fingertips 

Then he put his fingertips on mine

He didn’t sleep with me

He just left that night

Texted me the next day

Said he had a girlfriend

She was in the theatre group

She was vain he said

Two years later at his house

I asked him why he had a girlfriend then

Or something like that

He said he wasn’t dignified to answer

I think he meant he felt like it was beneath me to ask

He said it in a weird formal way

Anyway it felt good, sort of

He was so much thinner

His was disappearing

And way more high

He said his mom was threatening to kill herself again

And he had to go

He told me i was amazing

You know it was like he invented that word when he told me that

I still think about it

15 years later

It’s still my foundation

I wanted to stay all night

But he said it was dangerous for me

He said so many weird things that I didn’t understand

Sometimes I feel like he was asking ‘why are you here?’

But he never did

And I never saw him again

He was so close to disappearing

I learned something about myself

how much I could care 

Maybe in another life

We could enjoy simpler things

Like wondering if he thought I was pretty

But we couldn’t afford that

I never even knew if he wanted me

Jack the Lad

When he laughs and flashes his delicate teeth

turned me into a real writer