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enjoy this writing from
Ted Jackinsn in the Scars
free 2013 PDF file chapbook:

when the World
was Black and White
   


(click on the front cover image or the
title text to download the free PDF file)
when the World was Black and White, a Ted Jackinsn chapbook     when the World was Black and White, a Ted Jackinsn book You can also order this
as a 2013 6" x 9"
perfect-bound paperback
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Click on the cover spread
for the book when the World
was Black and White
A Quick Note (While we’re Okay)

Ted Jackins

    My friend, Samantha, was murdered when I was eighteen years old. It’s not every day that a teenager living in a small town like mine can say they lost someone so tragically and so suddenly like that but there it was waiting for me on the front page of the newspaper when I got home one afternoon. You know how when you go through something really heavy like that kind of loss where people tell you all the time “It gets easier to take with time.” I think that everyone who says it knows it isn’t true but what can you say to someone who has been through something like that? It’s a knee jerk reaction to be some kind of help, I guess.
    The pain of that single event, whether I knew it or not, had a tremendous impact on the next decade or so of my life that I’m just now starting to shake. You may start to notice that many of these poems are rather raw and rather dark and you will be right on both accounts. You will also notice many references to drinking and drugs, self mutilation and suicide, and once more you won’t be imagining things. In gathering these poems together for this book I, at first, had no real theme in mind. All I had was a title I had been carrying with me for a number of years and plenty of poems both old and new to choose from. Once I started to go through the works from over the years I noticed how much I still liked the darker pieces dealing with my then current issues with substance abuse and how explicitly I referenced the feelings that would later explode in one of the worst decisions I’ve made in my life.
    In picking up on all of this I began to piece the works together in the closest I could come to a chronological order. What I wanted to do was to create a time line of where I have been and where I finally wound up: sitting in a hospital room realizing that I didn’t want to die. So, if this flimsy book seems tough to take at times just know that the later works included are all pointing towards where I am now. I strive to keep my works as intense as possible because life is intense but the things I’m putting together now are intense in a very different way. There’s still darkness and there are still things I wrestle with and I suppose I always will, but now I allow myself to recognize the light and beauty in everything completely.
    With that in mind let me give you a glimpse back in time to when the world was black and white....



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