TONIGHT!

Tonight we celebrate the CD release of a fine singer/songwriter and good friend of mine, Ms.Amelia Card.  I met Amelia one night at Skinny’s Ballroom where she has been hosting an open mic.  I am always impressed by her sincerity of melody and tautness of rhythm.  She brought out a crew to my House Wine show last night.  We had a great time but tonight is the night, Brother.  We gon’ shake it on down and send her off to Paris with a new album and some great memories.

Song Swap/Performances by:
yours Truly
Juliana Murphy
Melissa Engleman
Justin Follin
and
Los Dos

Check out&show some support for Amelia Card’s new album, here.
And come on out, tonight!

come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
–Lucille Clifton

the Best,
Trainer

no new wisdom

Poem of mine featured on Wragsthinks.  Compiling&editing&reworking poetry from Spring/Summer 2012.  Volume of poetry due out in December 2012.  Snakes Will Eat You will be designing the volume.  WragsInk will be publishing it.  Doing a few readings to celebrate it and Anthology Philly‘s(in which I and Brother Bevan McShea are featured) release.

No new wisdom gleaned lusting the blue ruined rooms
no new blood on old streets stinging with your young idea.
Skies just pounding down w/a grey weight and Autumn’s braise
shrouding laughter of blackbird King in the end-of-summer rains.

Ciaou for now.

Trainer

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION or WHY I DON’T BELIEVE IN ENLIGHTENMENT

Some of us are stronger than this life.

The sky above the wasted yard was like a tight sheet of white aluminum.  We were all standing there when Shithouse rode out.  He was looking for someone to throw his weight down on.  The workers were too.  Get it over with.  Get the day over with and head back to the mess and to  the shacks for a greasy meal and a tepid shower.  That’s when Butch stepped up.  Shithouse was barely off his outrigger when Butch stepped up.
“Yeah?, ” Shithouse glowered down on Butch but what he meant was “FUCK YOU WANT WHITE BOY.”

There was a time in my life when I didn’t care.  A blind, self-immolating 20years falling upwards into shoretown jails and ghetto back yards.  A time of wrecked cars, 6am bottles of rye, real damage against myself and my friends and everyone.  It was around the end of the damage years when shit was at its worst.  That’s when I hung out with Butch the most.  The Year of the Cock and into ’06, or the Never Ending Summer of Evel Knievel as we refer to it here at the Office.
They’ve been ripping up 8th street so my life’s been on a kind of fuckall pause.  No concentration.  No privacy.  And the insipid beeping from backhoes&loaders backing up and down the street from 7am until after 6 at night.  And, Claude, our French-Canadian plumber, has been up on the third floor installing a new bathroom and getting rid of the black mold in Camp’s place.
These rueful&infuriating distractions were nothing compared to the bad blues that came down over us at the office over the last week or so.

Turns me on so loud, turns me on so loud it’s like no sound.  It’s a button pushed, says AIR RAID!  AIR RAID!
Chief, from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
I always liked Chief’s description of electro-shock therapy.  Snows of static start the dissociation.  From my disconnected place I can see the ugly&the untrue in all.  That’s how it feels, anyway.  I sense nothing but lies.  I’m completely isolated with Chief’s holy white pain coursing through me.  Hell is real, hell is a place.  The blues are real.  They come over me.  They take over, shut the rig down.  I get mean&withdrawn.  I have no tolerance for any graying of the black&white.  Ambiguity is my enemy.  If you are vague you are lying and are soon thrown to the lions and the outer circle.

Who’s to blame for the bad blues?  Would it matter if I could blame it on someone or something?  I doubt it.
I’m still paid visit by this horrible friend who’s never welcome and stays on anyway.  Death pulling up a chair, smoking all your cigarettes&drinking all your booze and molesting your girlfriend.
That’s about the smack of it, Pilgrim.  Discord&dissaray and tiny tests of sanity pin-pricking the days into excruciating minutes outside-total fucking war inside.  This time through the black was the most informative I can remember.  Or maybe it’s because I’m awake now.  I know that Greyhounds&Slavedrivers might get you through the painful afternoon but the night will come, it will find you and it will find you out.  The blues’ll keep you until the rueful morning, when it hurts the most.  When you fare your body, gage your surroundings and are suddenly thrown into the realization that you were born to trouble and this ain’t the high life but a hardlined grudge match with death&ruin.  The sun comes up&in.  And it hurts.  After all this time it’s not even a question, more of a-Oh.  I did it again. Dread rearing at the onset of another bullshit day filled with pain.  A combination of weariness and fear.  Coupled with a vodka headache and a mass of something black and deadly in your chest from a pathetic pack-a-day habit.
The reason I am telling you about Butch and the bad blues is simple.  Ol’ Butch Hammaday’ll be guest blogging on here very soon and I’m sorry you haven’t heard from me in a while.  I been on junkyard time.  Been pacing the bleak-black and hated landscape of my psyche.  I was checking in and I didn’t like it.  I was watching them and I didn’t like that either.  So, yeah, Butch and the bad blues.  Bad blues kept me from letting you know that I’ve been compiling&editing and reworking my poetry from the Spring and Summer.  WragsInk will be putting out a volume of the stuff.  We’ll be doing a reading here in Hippie Town to celebrate it and Anthology Philly‘s (in which I am featured) release.
Also, I’ll be playing singer/songwriter Amelia Card‘s CD Release/Going Away party this Friday.  I met Amelia at Skinny’s Ballroom where she hosts an open mic every Monday night.  Amelia is one of my very favorite singer/songwriters here in Hippie Town.  She’s really got an original thing happening, fresh but still very traditional.  I like traditional/roots music.  It’s why I slid down here in the Year of the Monkey.  I came down for the sound.  Also b/c of a thrice-bitter meltdown that’s somehow rewired my nervous system and conditioned me to jolt and rip out any connection that gets too close.  I got burned.  Big deal.  My time in Philly was a circus and there’s a sucker born every minute, although some people feel like a sucker every day of their life when they’re living in a town where they shoot you for your shoes.  I digress.  Big things are happening, we’re gonna shake it on down this fall, cut it loose and let it die.  Aho.  We’ll be trying to get some work done at the Office despite the fuckall drilling&beeping and insufferable chiggers.  Despite rounds won by a bad bitch of motherfucking blues.  Aho.  The terrible summer is over.

Can’tspeak

Can’t speak
Can’t talk
Can’t do anything they want
Can’t hide
Or change your mind
Gonna live w/ all my soul inside

Can’t speak
Can’t talk
Can’t stop for the reeling cause
Or love
I told ’em all about it
Can’t talk
Cause I’m already lost

Can’t think
Can’t cry
Keep thinking of a suicide
It’s hard
I just can’t forget it
Gonna fade cause I’m already dead

Can’t speak
Can’t talk
I don’t care if I live or die
I don’t talk
I just can’t believe it
Gonna fade cause I’m already dead

I can’t think
I can’t dream
Don’t believe anything I see
I know
I don’t wanna get it
Gotta leave or I’ll live to regret it

I can’t speak
I can’t lie
Can’t go anywhere to hide
I can’t think
I can’t cry
I keep thinking of a suicide

Can’t speak
Can’t talk
Can’t do anything they want
Can’t hide
Or change your mind
Gonna live w/ all my soul inside

lyrics by Danzig

Sick Of Talk

Don’t ask me stupid questions
I don’t have the answers to
Don’t tell me about your problems
Cause I’ll just ignore you
Sick of talk
I’m sick of talk
Don’t talk to me at all
Sick of talk
I’m sick of talk
Don’t talk to me at all
You bore the shit right out of me
All the things you say you do
Not the least bit interested
Don’t wanna have to listen to you
Sick of talk
I’m sick of talk
Don’t talk to me at all
Sick of talk
I’m sick of talk
Don’t talk to me at all

lyrics by Negative Approach

Shrieks of Paradise, Correspondence&Rails#5: Dear D.C.

The Office of Jim Trainer
Fox Den
Hippie Town, USA

D.C. Bloom
Ghetto Apartment
Road to Recovery, TX

8/18/12

Greetings-

You’re gonna burn in hell!

You know how many times I’ve heard that, D.C.? Enough times to doubt its veracity and especially after all these years.
For true.

The first time I heard it was when we lived in Friendswood, TX and my mom converted us to Baptist. I don’t have many memories from my childhood in Texas, but I distinctly remember a sweaty old man standing by a giant, creepy bathtub in some derelict building outside Houston. I was already baptized as a Catholic, was there really a need for me to go underwater with this coke-bottle wearing pervert with a weird grin? I didn’t think so. Aho, and even at 5 years of age, I knew how to Fuck-The-Bullshit and get to the free hot dogs&taters even if I was going to burn in hell.

The next time I heard it was in seventh (7th) grade. The middle school I was attending (or “the Building”, as I referred to it then) had implemented a “NO HEAVY METAL TEE-SHIRT” policy. They gathered us all in the school auditorium to make it official. I was wearing my ROOT OF ALL EVIL Slayer tee and sitting w/my friends in the third row. DAMAGE, INC. and Randy Rhodes/Ozzy Osbourne Tribute tees and etc. The long&short of it is, they made us turn our tee-shirts inside out that day, D.C. We could wear whatever we wanted to school (it was America after all) but when we got there we’d be greeted by Mr.Washinski, the woodshop teacher (sociopath), and he would make us turn our tee-shirts inside out. We could refuse, but we would be suspended and we were probably going to burn in hell for our taste in music and choice of apparel anyway.

What happened next is predictable&funny, if you like cheap thrills and are somehow, after all these years of abuse, still interested in history . What happened is-they started playing heavy metal on the radio.
Now, today, even cops have tattoos and they’re probably bumpin’ Hatebreed when they pull you over off Kinney Street during SX. Or, they’re listening to Marilyn Manson as they blast the “sand-niggers” back to their Jesus Christ holes over in the middle east. For true. I don’t need to tell YOU. We are warriors and we know. If we don’t, we’re wise enough to Walk On, with our heads down, and make it back to our little corner of nowhere for a stiff drink and a perverted session w/some poor woman’s Facebook photos.

My point?
The reason You’re gonna’ burn in hell rang so empty back then is b/c warriors like you&I know, D.C. We know there is a hell and that hell is a place. And that place is right here&now, motherfucker. What else? Suffering these jackboots in line in front of us at the Whole Foods Industrial Complex or out front Wal-Mart stabbing the sky with misspelled signs against: condoms&Facebook&rap music&whatever else they can’t understand which is pretty much anything that’s not on t.v. or in the news.
Who cares, D.C.? Not me, that’s for true. I’m living in the last Confederate Governor’s old place, down Judge’s Hill, off west 6th. I was born on March 6, the day of the Beauty Lovers. I don’t trust anyone (let alone my own mother for that whole Baptist debacle) but I fall in love with everyone I meet.

Well.
I’ve really gone off the rails with this one. Letting you know I’m the most hopeless romantic this side of Dylan Thomas wasn’t the point of this missive. It wasn’t my point at all. My point is, we will live to see stranger things than our own mortality, D.C. For true.
Cannibals&millionaires&sex addicts&Californians-it all comes home to roost.

Take the X-shaped chocolate laced w/ psilocybin that sat in my freezer until last night, for example. Its enabled me to out-weird the frat boys camped out&pissing in the bushes behind Fox Den this evening. Its made me strong&triumphant and even with no wine left or a coherent picture on the screen of this old black&white, I am content.
Contentment is key, D.C. Contentment is the difference between singing high lonesome songs into the Night and simply writing a letter to a friend by the light of an old black&white t.v. with a candle of San Miguel softly burning in the ruined rooms of the High Life.

Saint Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle;
be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray:
and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits
who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.

Amen
Yours,
Jim Trainer
Austin, TX

ribbons

of blue&white
tacked to
the Wall
above the
ruin&the Wine&the waste
on the broad oaken
table.
the pack of Parliaments
w/just two left, pens and
candles and
the empty bottle of
Faustino.
the summer it was
grand&triumphant,
hot but
replete w/the kind of losses
you’re thankful for
like being shot at
with her gun when
you knew the chamber only held
one.  that’s what
summer was-
a donning of hollow godheads,
dancing down blazing streets of yellow
collecting talismans
shaken from the tower
each one
with better luck.
each one with better luck.

Shrieks of Paradise, Correspondence&Rails#4: True Friend

The Ruined Rooms of the High Life
Fox Den
Hippie Town, USA

Anne Hyathe
Indian Creek
Austin, TX

Salud Snapdragon-

So the night has found us here. You in yr bed recovering from yr GNR weekend and me drinking Herbsaint and listening to Rachel’s on repeat. Oh well, it could be worse. We could live in Damascus or Upper Darby, PA. Dead flowers. Dead flowers sit on my window sill. Dead flowers following me around. Through the ruined rooms of the high life and down the bleak, black road of truth&consequence. We will live to see stranger things than our own mortality, snapdragon. For true.
In the meantime, it’s good we got t.v. and pools&shit. It’s good we can laze around the empty hours in the arms of people we don’t care about and drive fast down highways to nowhere. Truth is, I see so much of myself in you and I am glad. Glad yr 10yrs my junior and that yr suffering may come to a more benevolent conclusion than this-some harried cataclysm of luck&doom. Just don’t forget. And always remember.
We have been kissed by the gods. We know chance intimately and it has joined us for a spell. It has made the hard road slick&fortuitous. The rest of the world is awash&after some Jackpot or promise that could somehow justify. We don’t need justification. We have stood on the mountain. Like brother Nietzsche, we listen for an echo while the righteous&the wicked listen only for praise.
Remember this time. When you go back east. To the land of eat or be eaten. We have known&lived the Warrior’s life. There is nothing else. Life is not about winning, but discovering the unimportance of winning&losing, this is victory. That and love, true friend.

Hard to stay awake when all you see is pretty.
-Macy Minze

Good night.
Jim