Joan – I didn’t think of that meaning of “jacked up.” Good thing, probably – it would’ve been a longer poem if I had.

I have a picture of another Jack on Visual Soma right now: here.
i don’t know why there are so many, disparate uses for that word. It’s a verbal jack-of-all-trades.

Bill – I think I’m still at the finding-the-cow stage. Which is not to be confused with having a cow. Because you can’t have your cow and eat it too, jack.

Friends don’t let friends drink and blog. The accepted pattern is drink and blaughhhh!

Now I need a drink.

sarah b – Thanks. It’s my favorite too, actually. Poems like this don’t come around very often. I feel blessed.

David – Yeah. The most I’ve done is jack up one end of this house to put new footers under it. Of course, if we ever tried to put this house on a flatbed, it would fall apart.

I’ve noticed the foreshortened climb of the column of stanzas yields a great field reversal. Yes it billows upwards, but the house is also somehow perched, reduced by the distance of great height, in that tiny stanza at the bottom, much as any of your images of tree-tops reflected in a puddle in the dirt.

Pardonnez moi! I’ve broken my intent to only comment when sober…

Reduced, clarified, yet still “groaning”.

Burgeoning stanzas spreading like smoke. Drawn, filled, colored, modified, altered, handled, flapped and rolled out like a gel transparency. Punchy lines.

So glad you sold the cow!

The current term pejorative term (and who knows how it got, should we say so ‘twisted’) has all but obliterated the humble but aspiring jack term, unless you are on the highway jacking up your car, in which case you are truly jacked. To show how out of the lingo loop I really am, when I first heard “jacked up” from a friend I though she was all exited about something as in “pumped” . Duh. Although I have my suspicions, I ain’t going to speculate exactly how Jack morphed into so many different permutations. But here are some of them for us urban lingo challenged http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jacked+up