Creative – Bryce Jackson https://brycejjackson.com My Musings and Ideas Sun, 16 Feb 2025 07:06:20 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 https://brycejjackson.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cropped-Bryce-Pixel-48-2-32x32.png Creative – Bryce Jackson https://brycejjackson.com 32 32 The Nostalgia of A Telephone Number https://brycejjackson.com/2025/02/the-nostalgia-of-a-telephone-number/ Sun, 16 Feb 2025 07:06:20 +0000 https://brycejjackson.com/?p=338 Of the memories to remember, to try and remember! That first one when we looked into each other’s eyes—when we knew it all, all at once, the beginning and the end of it all. We knew it was a disaster, lurking in the night, the silence between the sways of an eternal pendulum. I forget that first moment when I lost myself in your eyes, the seconds of years, the moments where the world around us didn’t materialize as distance between us, our lives became the distance between us. The unfinishedness of us. The steadfast of memory! But what good is a memory of backspacing! The delight of a moment! What good is a memory if it’s not readily sustained, like gravity and change. The toll of a lifetime, loving as a constant and forgetting. The easy part is forgetting, which washes away the sins of the bad times and the ugliness of it all while the nostalgia slips in, mocks you, and punches you straight in the mouth. Fucks you up like Orange Driver! All my delusions are on repeat of loving and forgetting and having no way to erase you. I’m stuck on repeat, pressing the same broken buttons. So, here on repeat.

This won’t be a pretty sight; this way, I write. I write like the shadow a bird’s wings make over the pavement. Probably a seagull or better fitting, a pigeon (that takes me 3 times to spell correctly). I hope to be cyclic, redundant, and repetitive in nature, like an alphabet series or the noodles floating around in the chicken soup, an A, an S, or a broken L.

So, I repeat myself like stars and patterns found in nursery rhymes. Yet, there is no point. It goes on. Isn’t it sarcasm time again? Isn’t that just too difficult to catch on the tip of an eyelash? It’s the humidity of words weighing you down; what does this fucker mean? Whatever does he mean?

When I am serious, I speak monotone and fast but slow, steady, and straight into your eyes. Then take a moment, look at my pauses, the emoted ellipses searching for something outlandish, stupid, outlandish (probably sexual), and you know I’m trying to make you laugh, but do not forget the difference. It never comes out right; first time, second time, third time, no striking—this isn’t fucking baseball. It’s like playing the piano; I’m guaranteed to fuck up every song. I’m no Schubert. I’m barely me. I’ll live with my crappy piano playing. I’ll tap those keys harder, softer, longer and slurred and sustained like when I’m drunk. I’ll figure out Tiersen better than any argument. I ramble like my grandmother. Perhaps we’re related. So maybe I won’t take life so seriously, I won’t write everything as a metaphor of tired inner dialogue, and just maybe I’ll use lighter language and dehumidify and desaturate my words. Press them lightly as a tender kiss on your head, our eyes closing to our end.

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Unsurprisingly, The Same. https://brycejjackson.com/2024/08/unsurprisingly-the-same/ Fri, 02 Aug 2024 02:28:50 +0000 https://brycejjackson.com/?p=330 And I’m supposed to be quick! A battery of chemical reactions tells me! And Otis — that dead man tells me too.

The passionate vibrato infused within his voice as he sings each note. Otis’ distinct moment and memory circulate and repeat so that we all can hear and create our own short-lived passions across the play of one of his melodies. A single moment that spans and spreads across the universe as our own recycled memories.

There’s an innocence to memory. Over time, we forgive and forget ourselves. The cycles of memory and moments that sustain our passions, desires, and wants. The constants that do not span across hours but are fixed to the point where the clock on the wall doesn’t fall asleep, waiting. It’s not frozen. It’s not tired. The forever of a lifespan, between the shadow and the soul. Now the day is over, that singular moment fades from memory. With the night, the desire, the craving, the want and hunger, a daydream turned real, ourselves entwined and lost in the reality of passion. Now, the morning comes. The night is over. The wind blows, stars die. We all die — the batteries run out. The cycles fade and shrink. Constants shift into invariable variables and crumbled pieces.  It’s all the same in the end; settling. Settling with Elmer’s, settling putting it all together and hoping the glue holds it all when you are tired and desperate and lost and see the most beautiful and fucked up-looking puzzle you’ve ever seen, and you realize it’s not even a 3d one and either way — either way — it’s not staying together even with the rubber cement, not even super glue. Nothing keeps something so imperfect together; this set of dreams and moments and constants, our passions and desires. Nothing can when so many pieces belong to another picture puzzle where all the pieces fit. Love is not a recycled notion but a constant cut directly from the soul.

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Our Oceans https://brycejjackson.com/2024/06/our-oceans/ Thu, 13 Jun 2024 02:42:15 +0000 https://brycejjackson.com/?p=327 All my pieces fall to pieces. You are the one piece I cannot let go, but all my pieces fall to pieces. You are the one piece – the one! From some imaginary Multnumah-inspired clifftop, I see myself jump off, watching the rocks divide our pieces into two sad biblical pieces floating, like a child, down the river, heading toward two different colored oceans.

Oceans apart, you are always all my pieces.

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How can you be sure? https://brycejjackson.com/2024/05/how-can-you-be-sure/ Sat, 25 May 2024 07:26:19 +0000 https://brycejjackson.com/?p=309 I’ll walk through this door. I’ll walk across this horizon where the snow-covered sand reflects my shadow. But perhaps this time, this time it shows nothing. All the footprints are gone with the shore. The stars offer only their hapless glow. Across the darkness, a spotlight is on your face, your lips are chapped, and your breath is fogging. Our eyes meet and lock. Yet, I am tired of metaphors, symbolic gestures, and social varnish.

This world is best experienced as metaphors and abstractions and obtuse tropes. This world is best looked at with rolling hills and swaying blades of grass, green and yellow glinting from the sun; that amazing sun, that persistent ball of hydrogen and helium, yellow, red, ruthlessness, and recycled hurt and heat— flaring, soaring, blazing, distantly silent.

And with this, I ask, how can you be sure? “How can you be sure?” These words rip across my flesh, tracing across my old scars. These simple, short words thrust across arteries; the interior bleeding suffocates the lungs. Will there ever be a way to separate it all? Here is one day and another. Here is this moment for you across the moonlight. This one, this one dream, this one wish shines within a well. I want my wish back like the Goonies, but the end is the same.

It’s where even the most ridiculous events bring us to a scene of being inside an empty wishing well. Rain falls down on your face and that moment slows down. The scene transforms into following little beads of water falling down on blades of grass and bark of the old oak trees; sky weeping, soul following, falling, sinking, absorbing just a few notes of a song that started before you were born. This is hurt, this is love, this is everything and nothing where you reach out and hate, reach out and love, and you defend and offend, you find a way through the dark looking for that fucking fantastic sun!

Looking through a drop of rain, you notice something or perhaps nothing. Nothing, as you realize you have your own disappearing shadow desperately existing, being, clinging, seeking the sun. And it all fades to black as the enveloping metaphor begins its first loop, and we wake up. And I forget you never choose me no matter the infinite variations in every repeated iteration.

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The Second Time https://brycejjackson.com/2024/05/the-second-time/ Fri, 24 May 2024 07:25:27 +0000 https://brycejjackson.com/?p=306 Somehow, saying goodbye for the second time is more difficult than I ever could have imagined. Of course, I was never imagining this moment again. The tropical glow of unadulterated love, weighed by our naked arms and legs entwined like plush braided rope. Your eyes drag their pointed blue across my chest — a melodramatic gesture like my fingertips inching to your inner thighs. And now, love, there’s nothing else but to live that and all its tragedy soaking the sheets into a sunset we’ll never share across an orange and purple sky. Our bodies, wet, pulsing, shivering in the abrupt thrill of our brief fantasy. The waves pressing down on our bodies into a silhouette of sand and the past, our moment washed away with the undertow of time and practicality.

We have become glacial icebergs, burying ourselves deeper into our ocean to drown the possibilities as they bobble in our own prisons.

I love you. Always. Now. Then.

I just wish. I suppose it’s silly for me to say certain things to you. I’m living in a past, present, and future fantasy that I wish could be if there was enough time. But “O let not time deceive you, you cannot conquer time. In the burrows of the nightmare where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow and coughs when you would kiss.” Time stands still for me; our lips touching made of shadow and yesterday, the beautiful taste of anticipation of tomorrow when our bodies drown for the last time.

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The Cursory Infinity https://brycejjackson.com/2024/05/the-cursory-infinity/ Fri, 24 May 2024 05:45:59 +0000 https://brycejjackson.com/?p=303 The blinking cursor appreciates the pause and the thoughtful moment to find a better word than that first one — this first one. The blind second before the utterance of a word becomes an infinitely inked philosophy, the blinking, cursory movement becoming a patience, acceptance and confidence anchored in an authenticity of reflection and values across multiple paths of a word and a kiss. Aside from my abstract agreement, I find my critique towards a particular value of authenticity. At this moment, let us go this way. Yet, with more understanding, I would like to correct a little to the left or right. Yet, the luminous headlights of you and I suggest I must decide now. Let go or embrace with a voice of infinity. You and I both… This dance is finally over, yet I curtsy as if to bow, arm extended and palm exposed, waiting to enfold our fingers, pausing, to see you and then we both let go upon this dark dream.

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A Quick Moment Across https://brycejjackson.com/2021/01/a-quick-moment-across/ Mon, 04 Jan 2021 06:18:27 +0000 https://brycejjackson.com/?p=147 This is the moment. This very moment of touch across blurred lines like a drunk conversation. This is the dashed white lines reflected from an irreverent moon. This is finger tips across the soft hills of breasts and valley of your stomach that continues down the curve of your thighs and the arch of feet. It is a night where words on a paper will never describe adequately, crumbled up and caught up against tongue and lips. Tangled and twisted, roots of a sad oak, naked legs entwined. This night is where words fail across mouths and find their way floating across cheek and against bone. And in a quick moment across you, I have vanished into the night of words without you.

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The Dream of Suicidal Ice Cubes https://brycejjackson.com/2019/03/the-dream-of-suicidal-ice-cubes/ Sun, 03 Mar 2019 21:52:57 +0000 https://brycejjackson.com/?p=104 So it started off as if something was wrong. It started off like a set of ice cubes settling in a glass, cracking, crackling, shifting. It started off without a smile on my face. It started out with so many things that I thought could never happen. And it did. The ice continues crackling, reconciling with the tall glass for silence.

It’s something that never really seems to settle like a language, like punctuation that leaves things wondering and wandering. The twinkle of this star makes up the same crackling, the same unsettled motion of ice across time, against glass.

And now, now, this is where it all plays in slow motion…slower, slower yet, where your eyes come into this scene, where all of you is a dream, but your eyes come forward, connected to your kisses, connected to a cocktail napkin, where I sleep just to find you.

I wake up to find you and the ice cubes, no delusions, a melted mix of the haunted past. And if I could ride on such a thing, stirred up and agitated, erupt forward and upward out of the glass onto the table, melting away, melting away into you where it all leaves me as a dream to where I search for any hint of you, a smell of the fragments of voice, the strands of hair, to where I find something to remind me, this is more than a context, more than chemical reactions.

It is waking and knowing; this is where I want to be.

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