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Jacquline Musgrave Poem
Motherly Instinct
Mother and daughter, 35 and 13.
Public transportation, their carriage pulls in. Mom drops her matches, quickly picking them up. Stepping on the bus, the mom senses the hunt, as wolves seethe and inhale the scent of young prey.
Aging wings are beautiful, yet stretch not far enough
to shelter her young from the burning lasers leering holes through her daughters tan perfect skin.
Mother stares with a purpose, intent to offend. Calling out the most savage of the grinding javelina, spitting fatal venom across the bus at the savages.., her daughter phone-stricken, oblivious...
The bus approaches their stop, the mother
hisses and strikes, She scoops up her young, shielding her from the putrid stench of raw split-hooved perversion.
In her purse a flask of cheap liquor store gin. Casually pouring from her hand to the floor leaving a trail as they step out the door.
The sidewalk is the home of the next match that she lights- inferno ignites the domino game.
Onto the bus the intention made known as their flaming faces melt into clay down into their pants, leaving puddles of burnt tongues and hair on the seats. The mother laughs in revenge, but the dream is cut short.
“ Mom, this is our stop. How can you sleep on the bus?”
They exit the bus, she tries to regroup
“ Mom, you dropped your matches….again”
Copyright © Jacquline Musgrave | Year Posted 2017
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Jacquline Musgrave Poem
I am a rose bud closed and shy, my young emotions tucked tightly inside myself to protect from exposure.
When threatened, as a new rose my thorns ward off outsiders and tell them to leave me be. My petals are soft and virgin, never knowing sunlight or cold, void of touch or expression. They are pure, still growing, underdeveloped and quite fragile.
I become a young bud, ready to sense the world around me. I am curious to feel sunlight. I am becoming aware of myself and I watch to see how the other flowers open themselves. My feelings are developing inside the petals within and I am in the world.
As a maturing rose, I become strong enough to open my petals and expose my feelings. I allow myself to feel the rain on them and let it roll off of them as tears for those I have hurt with my thorns, and for the happiness I feel to be open and free. The sun feels warm on my moist foilage, and I am strong, capable of pollinating, and I welcome the chance. The world is new, and though naive, I am in my prime, standing out amongst the others.
As an aging flower, I find it harder to lift my head up. My vibrant petals have darkened and shrunken and I am withered, having lived a full life cycle. My petals each represent the emotions I was designed to feel in this lifetime. Hunger, thirst, sadness, contentment, desire, regret, love and thankfulness.
As I feel the complete experience of each emotion to it's fullest, each petal represented therein may fall off. Each one, discarded to the earth and when you see me bare with no petals, you will be sad that I am almost gone but I will rejoice because I will know I am complete. I have done what I came to do, and though others may have been considered more beautiful, they took nothing away from the beauty that I encompassed within. Even as I harden and dry out, petal less, shriveled and dying, I am grateful for the experience to have known life for it is better to have lived and died than to never have existed at all.
Copyright © Jacquline Musgrave | Year Posted 2021
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Jacquline Musgrave Poem
Coming back from a college class, feeling tired
I crawl on top on my bed for a midday nap and slip into a blissful sleep. Aroused from slumber, my bed shaking violently and turning , I expect to see a human, recognizable and known to me. Familiar and welcome.
There is no one.
Checking to see I am awake
Checking to see if I am alone.
Checking my mental state to find derangement.
Nothing .
Dismissed,
I start to slip into the slumber and it shakes again. I am hyper alert
Wide awake. I ask myself Is it really shaking
Yes.
My eyes open and I go to rebuke what this is and it enters without warning-
In through the top of my head following a path leading to where my soul resides, it screams at me in foreign tongue.
Computerized, synthesized, screeching and vile.
The voice drips with evil, hate and threatens to touch the core of my human essence.
I am in danger of replacement.
I am being hijacked for this body
My soul runs from this entity and screams for our maker to witness this violation, to raise His sword at this reptile, to help me fight the unseen.
It is forced back out through the top of my head and I lay there sweating, panting, contorted. Violated.Impure.
Tainted and broken, I feel terrorized.
At my next sleep, I am awakened to find I cannot move my body- only my eyes and I hear that voice laughing at me. Mocking me. Reminding me he is there, stalking me and waiting for me to drop my guard.
The worst part of it all friends....
This story is true.
6 seconds. Changed me for eternity.
Take heed. This really happens to people.
They call this a " walk-in". Soul interchange.
Where a human soul is replaced with a demon.
So yes, they walk amongst us.
When you wonder how people can do some of what they do-
Now you know- because they aren't people.
05/06/2021 sponsor- Funom Makana
Copyright © Jacquline Musgrave | Year Posted 2021
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Jacquline Musgrave Poem
Walking into the busy corner store, I get my chips, my drink, and get in line. The store, there for years, owned by an American family. The store is crowded, people everywhere. There is a loud Hispanic man at the front, shirt unbuttoned, missing teeth, unshaven. He snarls at the cashier, and loudly yells, “So, what’s it like to be a Muslim in America today?” Everyone freezes, gasps, and is embarrassed for the man,
out of ignorance, -controversy…
The crickets quit chirping for the reply.
“It is wonderful for me, I am an American before I am a Muslim”, he says “and it is much better than being an American in Iraq! I can tell you that!” Everyone laughed and agreed. He concluded, “ It is not America’s fault,...everyone knows that all Muslims are not terrorists,...the problem is that all terrorists are Muslim….I hate terrorists!” he smiles and laughs it off.
I being a white woman dug into my soul. Wanting to relate, to feel him bleed red as I too bleed red, I gained perception. I realized most serial killers are white. I fully understood. Though a bit too big, I stood there in his shoes and thought, “I hate serial killers.” What I learned from it all?
That he was Muslim.
I had always seen a kind man, without label.
That evening, needing milk, I walked to the corner store…..
Copyright © Jacquline Musgrave | Year Posted 2017
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Jacquline Musgrave Poem
Awakened by cops, I am frightened and confused. My parents arrested, I was removed. From house to house, I am placed with mannequins who “love” in parentheses. “Mommy, when will you come?” Her face plastered everywhere, yet she is nowhere. I was so young, then one day I turn eighteen. Return to thick, robust roots.
Knock on my old door,
Greeted by stranger blankly,
“How can I help you?”
My caseworker forgot to put life skills in my suitcase. A life sized adult body with a child inside on stilts. That night was the first one sleeping on hard surfaces. Aged out, and graduated from child protective services to homeless and forgotten on somebody's lunch break. They eat a cardboard club sandwich.
Middle aged mother
Inquiring about her child
“Sorry Ma’am, that files closed”.
I wrote this poem as a haibun, trying to keep it emotionless and rather concrete, inserting haiku that I hope adds new dimension to the prose. I am trying to hit home without actually hitting anything! This is my first haibun.
Copyright © Jacquline Musgrave | Year Posted 2017
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Jacquline Musgrave Poem
Today
Times have changed from yesterday
when our problems fit neatly on the Sunday paper, and when we put the paper down, we could block it out. That stuff happened to other people...not us.
We could put it on the back burner, and forget it was simmering, tell the kids “No, nothing’s burning- everything’s FINE.”
We almost sounded convincing. We pulled it off. Now, it has gotten different.
How does our youth wrap their heads around the terrifying reality we face as a neighborhood, as a nation, and as a species?
What do we tell our kids now, as they hear the news and see the media? That adults are crazy and they don’t know what they are doing? The children see the stripes about to melt off of the American flag.
Anxious to the point they are sick,
They know exactly what we are up against,
and they face it without life practice. Inexperience. They are and truly feel helpless. They are terrified, preoccupied with the unknown. It stifles the air, and makes it hard to breathe- this tension all around us. Resembling doom. Taking on the feel of utter despair, the earth is cringing in anticipation of casualties. We dare not breathe.
If you are wanting a baby, look around you. This is not the time or place. Love your unborn child enough to save him from what is coming. Cherish his pureness enough to not bring something so beautiful into this ugly corrupt world where demons hold political office. Where nuclear fallout knocks at your door and the four horsemen await their cue to ride. When you hear the trumpet, you will know you did the right thing. And to everyone else, when you hear the trumpet, tell your youth you love them and give them a hug, for the world will NEVER be the same.
Copyright © Jacquline Musgrave | Year Posted 2017
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Jacquline Musgrave Poem
How do I look at you and let go?
Once joined by the beauty of nature,
Coming from my own body like an extension of myself.
You are the only one who has heard my heart beating from the inside.
Attached by a life line- a cord cut and discarded.
You became your own person.
The world too ugly and vile for a perfect little person to grace.
No one worthy of your pureness and innocence.
Slowly corrupted.
Slowly growing away from me with every year that passes.
My love for you unchanged.
So solid, devoted and loyal.
I think of you going on and starting your own family, knowing I won't be here yet much longer.
How do I look at you and let go?
When I see what Father Time has done to my body, and I know my time has passed, I need to see you swim on your own.
Without any help from anyone, swim to the other side.
No one can ever change who we are to each other and what we have.
What we share.
Once I see you have reached the other side, I can then embrace you one last time and know part of my soul will live on through you- then I can release it all because my job has been completed.
You must release as well because it is just part of life. Just know that when I look back I will wonder how I ever let go of the world-
Because thats what you are to me.
Copyright © Jacquline Musgrave | Year Posted 2021
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Jacquline Musgrave Poem
I sit in the chair, nervous and accepting of the fate I have created. I have earned the right to be here, through careful planning and methodical artistry. How is it my fault if they fell for my antics? They called my ideas diabolical and inhumane, as I orchestrated one masterpiece after another. Sure, it was with human life, but none of those lives were amounting to much. I, with my good looks, and my persuasive charm took hold of each one of them, one by one and made them my own. They, with their thin frames and feminine curves eager to assist when they smelled my enticing cologne. They pulled me close to assist me and looked lovingly into my big blue eyes unknowing that they would feed my inner sexual desires and end up strangled on the side of a road. Interstate 90 was an old friend who assisted me in my most devious encounters. I was fueled by media, and sexual violence portrayed in Hollywood on big screens everywhere. You want to put something on trial? Put the media on trial!
The media with its glorified sexual violence that fueled my inner beast, causing it to surface and take me over. Once it came out there was no taming the beast- not until someone lay lifeless at my hand, me breathing hard, satisfied, then coming back to my senses and terrified at what I had done.
Do I feel remorse? Yes, of course, but not so much for the victims or their loved ones but for the ones that are to come because in all of your cities there are dozens more just like me and you don’t even know it.
You don’t even see what you are creating with your media and your sexualized violence. This chair I sit in now is uncomfortable. The straps cut into my arms, the thing strapped onto my head. You think you can kill me? I will just change form and continue to rape the minds of the innocent. Go ahead, pull the lever. Pull it again, watch me smoke. Smell my flesh as I leave this world and to you who pulled the lever...Oh yes, we shall meet again. But will you meet me, or the beast within?
Copyright © Jacquline Musgrave | Year Posted 2017
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Jacquline Musgrave Poem
Three years have been a lifetime,
In a place unfathomable-
Met with a gun barrel to the scalp,
Scars cover his back, tortured for freedom,
Punished for a woman he loves who stands proud with her flame to the sky
signaling opportunity…
Starved with aching intestines, dreams of Mother’s cornbread, visions of his homeland.
He awakens to skin crawling, feet burning, lesions-
Forgotten? He dreams of her, with her pointy tiara, and her book of law, and justice. No justice here.
Breaking back, cracked lips- Struggling alone, his language is unheard, laughable, PROPAGANDA.
He is kicked, beaten, ....Cornbread fills his nostrils, he can smell the sweet butter..
He opens his eyes, through tears and blood. Blisters are open and burn his hands, calloused and course.
His eyes grow cold, as his hair crawls down his shirt to his spoon, into his cabbage water. He cries inside, for his innocence lost, for who this will make him become….for what he cannot have.
Inhumane, he is like cattle and he is branded. Unjust, unknown, he whispers “please…” They see him….”Stupid American.”
Let freedom ring, but not cry, for here freedom is stripped bare. Life wears a new face, like a gaunt grotesque mask. His goals have been altered, his future detoured. Devoured. His essence and soul turn grey like static.
His heart swells, his guts filled with stress and blood, rice dances a sobering number on his sternum. He hates them. He looks to the sky, the same sky he gazed upon from his bedroom window at home as a boy. Wonders of what he’d be when he grew up...he never imagined it would be this.
His soul is in shock from what he’s seen, he had never seen evil, naked and complete, raw, unrelenting.He now stares it in the face daily. This will change who he is forever. His mother dies a thousand deaths every day he is there. She regrets having sheltered him trying to protect him from the evil in this world and now he is clueless in the grips of the devil himself.
Their leaders will pay for their grandeur, their deceit and their brutality for they know better, yet they are young still, and though decorated, they must not remember...Nagasaki.
Let Freedom Ring, and feel free, to be brave. This too shall pass….his soul longs for him to keep quiet and never speak of this place of this inhumane wretched existence...his soul answers …
but I have too much to declare.
Copyright © Jacquline Musgrave | Year Posted 2017
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Jacquline Musgrave Poem
Looking herself in the mirror.
She is not thin, air brushed, or photoshopped
Magazines show real beauty
She cries at what she will never be.
She sees a frumpy, average girl.
She is young, vibrant, sweet-
but not beautiful.
Her homely reflection gawks at her in her tainted, ugly mirror.
It laughs at her naked body, pointing at her flaws and spitting at her
The magazine airbrush images are real to her, and she idolizes impossible images
Unattainable-
Unrealistic.
In her dreams she is airbrushed to
perfection, no one understands.
The boy she likes stares at her like she is a circus freak on stilts, wearing a mustache and a tutu.
Sleeping pills will take this pain
and imperfection away, just for today.
Just for forever.
In her coffin she lies at peace, as the people say their respects.
The boy she adored walks up, looks at her. “Sad isn’t it?”someone says.
The lump in his throat strangles his voice...
All he can do is look at her,
Lifeless,...and think
‘She was so beautiful.’
She never knew...
Copyright © Jacquline Musgrave | Year Posted 2017
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