JASON HACKETT - POEMS

Jason Hackett is an English Lit. Major who put his writing skills to good use as an advertising copywriter. He wrote his way up through the ranks and, twenty-plus years later, Jason is now owner and creative director of HAPI, an ad firm located in his hometown of Phoenix, AZ. Every day, he can be found banging away at his keyboard, playing with words and concepts. Jason’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal of American Poetry and Slippery Elm Literary Journal.

UNCONSCIOUS DECISION
​

I fell into a coma I can’t get out of.
A long trip from a house roof’s tip
Toppled me from a sturdy stance
Into a tumbling dance,
Dropping two stories into an ambulance
Ten miles to a hospital bed
Where tubes and slow-moving vitals
Hang onto my life’s last thread.
 
I woke up alert within my subconscious.
The cavernous, black mushiness
Would normally scare the heck
Out of my claustrophobia
If it weren’t for the morphine drip’s
Dali trip, A Persistence of Memory,
Time melting my life away,
Ticking down to the end-of-me.
 
A faceless nothing yells, get up.
My subconscious, consisting
Of a small band of active neurons,
Survivors of the fall,
Screams at me to dress,
Clean the mess of
My life piled in thousands of fragments
Before me on the floor,
Faces and places I know I can’t remember
In no order of importance.
Antagonizing me, organizing me  – 
Piece by piece, face by face, memory by memory –
Prioritizing my mental rehab, it says,
Will put my brain back together well enough
To wake my life up.
 
I ignore the voice for others more familiar,
Way, way out, muffled
As if through a pillow.
They cry worried.
My chest invisibly heaves
My cry back for their pain that
Stings as much as mine.
A finger twitch attempts an SOS,
A call of distress,
To assure them I’m alive, mending the switch
The fall smashed to bits,
Turning my consciousness off.
 
Damage prevents anything from getting through,
Signals too, regardless of my efforts. 
My thoughts refuse to straighten,
My hopelessness greatens;
Re-ordering pictures,
Memories irretrievable,
Too inconceivable for my damaged brain.
 
Slowing alive and quickening dead,
Sorting my life’s wreck on the floor,
From which, in my frustration, opens a door.
The faceless voice of my subconscious
Looks worried.
Resist, it says hurried,
That is death’s door.
It insists, get back to work
Putting your life back together.
 
My curiosity bests me.
I push through the door
Out onto a tranquil beach
Set in an oyster shaped cove,
Rumbling with perfect waves.
The sunshine feels like shade,
Cool and never burning.
There is a stand where I can order a beer,
A fish taco, a steak too, whatever I want,
And cheer a band playing hits from every band perfectly
Led by a woman plucking two lyres
With the air of a siren.
 
Friends not seen since their passing
Are amassing in front of the band dancing.
The voice at my shoulder pulls me back
Toward the cavernous black mushiness.
 
I resist the voice like I didn’t the door.
The sand in my toes feels too good.
The salt flavored breeze puts my mind at ease.
I follow a trail from the beach up to a mountain
To a great eagle sculpted fountain gushing
Into a waterfall rushing into a pool filled with trout
Swimming hungrily about,
Imbued with a golden hue. 
Waiting on the shore is
An available chair that looks
An awful lot like a seat from Lambeau field,
With a fishing rod hungry for a catch.
 
 
I see a small table with framed pictures of my family,
Wife, kids, grandkids, friends, a well-lived life
Placed as an unfair reminder from the
Synapses struggling to survive
My body dying,
Trying to refocus me on what’s at stake.
 
If I live, I will be stuck in a black mushiness
Dragging out hope unfairly
For loved ones who
Need to move on with their lives,
As I need to move on with mine.

My unconscious decision:
Set them free from me, lovingly,
Free from the dread of a life tied to a bed,
Tube fed, thoughts unable to be said,
Watching their love dissolve to wishing
I was gone, a love hanging on, like my life,
By a thread,
Not the way I want to be remembered dead.
Eventually, it will not be me suffering
But them,
My refusal refuses to let that happen.
 
I hold a finger up to my friends dancing,
Waving me over.
Tell them to order for me a beer,
Ready a cheer.
I hug my subconscious, defeated, staring,
Thank it for caring.
I wish I could somehow signal I am okay
Up there to let them know.
I cannot today.
But they will arrive someday
To embraces of their beautiful faces,
With them an embrace of my decision
To return to the door
That leads to the black mushiness.
Why I decided, as a caring soul should,
As any loving husband, father, grandfather, friend would,
To close the door on my life for good.
 
 

​A BIRTH, A DEATH OR BOTH

Agonizing, unbearable pain
Only hell can inflict
Bends ruptured flesh into unnatural
And nauseating writhing
Desperate to rid the hurt, unknowing how.
 
Clenched hands sweep the air frantically
For solace, or maybe God.
 
A life not going according to plan
Gains premature admission to an emergency room.
 
Nurses rush, push buttons,
Make calls and ask questions too calmly.
They must know something horrible.
What secrets aren’t they sharing?
 
Worst fears, real or imagined,
Unleash a thick, morbid fog,
Suffocate the emptiness of the baby’s room.
 
The doctor is being gotten
As the gurney slides in a controlled hurry
Under florescent lights scurrying backwards
Numbed by the sight of a thousand times before.
Worry is nothing to them but funny-looking.
 
The hallway leads to new territory.
Eyes lock fleetingly, more scared
Than on the day they were married.
Emotions unsuccessfully decipher the future.
 
Hands push together evenly against the
Pain of unknowing, yet are also lopsided.
Her hand holds a life safe.
His hand holds two lives threatened. 
 
Sedation calms the fright
Enough to make, “It’s going to be alright,” believable.
Seemingly a hundred scalpels launch at her skin.
 
 
Her body explodes open like a shot melon.
Blood splatters on faces, floors and walls. 
Doctors, soaked in red, work hard for life.
 
The scene scalps mind from reality.
The room disassociates into a macabre movie set,
A slaughterhouse where fiendish demons dance
Deliciously around the beloved protagonist,
Hacking her soul
To feast on the center of her universe.
 
Tears wash away the disgust at such a thought
Breaking apart his frame of mind.
Doctors have one take to get this right.
No extra cuts, too many have already occurred.
Too much blood has spilled between them.
 
The choreography of pointing, cutting and shouting,
Machines beeping and breathing, finally, halts.
Pain leaves the room in excruciating silence.
The bloodbath aftermath takes on the pallor
Of dying skin
Awaits the verdict of whether it is to turn pink again.
 
A hopeful scream rises to turned heads.
Whose cry is so grateful for suffering to be done?
More silence. Fatigued silence.
Whether cry of a new life,
A new death, or both,
Tears greet every ending.
May they all rest in peace.
 
 

THE CONCERT-GOERS OF YORE
​

​Before salt and sand,
Spots on hands,
Before time etched its presence
On souls, skin and eyes,
Before minds got wise
To how weariness bends backs.
 
Worry- and worldly-free,
Smiles carved from the contentment
Of just being,
Returned to again be,
For a blink anyway,
Innocence, freed
From yellowed Polaroids
And fuzzy 8mm memories.
 
To when the band
Was still a secret crush
Felt in their hearts only,
In no rush to be heard on the radio,
Before fame had yet to brush them
With ubiquity and politics,
And misappropriated world responsibilities.
 
Silvered, tattooed, concert Ts,
Worn thin on thickened skin,
Piercings filled in,
Images their children laugh at,
Gather to protest obsolescence.
 
The lights darken.
The teleportation begins.
The band plays time backwards,
A cassette rewinding the years
To the exact moment
Of youth’s perfection.
 
Rusted vocal cords
Dig up buried lyrics,
Sing loudly
As if no one’s watching.
 
Silhouettes twist in darkness, hidden,
Uncaring of mirrors, birth dates, cards dealt,
High on vigor’s exuberance
Veins too long ago felt.
 
Age sneers at them, jealously.
Decades get snubbed out
On heels like cigarettes,
Flicked to the floor,
As if all those years between past and present
Never existed,
As if they weren’t close acquaintances,
As if they didn’t co-exist in the same body together. 


The speed at which
Music passes through air
Moves slower than time’s ticking
Which brought them there,
Succumbs to the trance
Of a spell conjured up by the band
Freezing now in sets.
 
The present folds inward,
Wholly surrendering.
Adolescence runs carefree through open fields
Happy to have eternity back again.
Off they go joyously, tears in eyes,
Love in hearts, youth in hand,
Dancing to the sweet melodies of former selves,
Capturing back when in a bottle.
 
 

IMPRISONED PASSING

​Down the corridor history dares not go, she is there
Entangled in remorse’s snare,
Waiting for my words to cut her free.
A thorn in my heart                                                                                       
From the first second’s start
Lasting twenty-two years,
Uncomfortably prods my dormant love while
Conjuring wasted memories
Littered with land mines and difficult smiles.
Freedom she yearns?
In her chest her fearing burns,
Becoming ever more painfully aware in
Her cancer’s impatience.
How dare she
Be set free
From my impossibility,
From the ruinous hatred she indelibly inked
On my heart’s now impenetrable walls,
Forevermore steeled against future love’s falls.
Me she calls?
I will let her pass,
What stands between us, I shall not.
I will not purge her from herself.
She will die alone in regret,
Buried sinfully and uncleansed,
I with upturned lips.
This decision, I know,
Will haunt me as eternally
As it did her, though.
Dying crying
With spoiled repentance on my stilling chest
Pressing heavier upon my final breaths,
Which will feel no different than my life with her,
Still crushing the life out of me.
My burden, you see,
By not releasing her
I chose not to be released by her.
‘Til death do us part, her final act,
Goodbye kiss, parting pact
To me, to carry over my misery,
Just as she.
So that I too shall pass,
Imprisoned.