COME ON IN

THIS POST WAS WRITTEN ON NOVEMBER 29, 2019

for Amy

I kind of like it.  This front loading of blog posts at world’s end.  Keeps me on track.  I’m not trying to reconcile but integrate the fact that all effort and endeavor are for naught.  In as soon as 11 years the diminishing returns of our carbon-based culture will be indisputable and the clearing off of 70% of us should be the final nail and at least make it finally clear–it didn’t matter.  All we’ve done or reached for. It doesn’t help that psychologically as humans we rely on a kind of “presentism”.  Our minds insist that what is is what was and more importantly–what is is what will be.  Otherwise it’s chaos and don’t I know it.  I tried smoking the chaos away. To great effect I should say so maybe that’s not the best example.  I tried everything I could to quiet the roaring strife of infinite growth and decay, the turning wheel of dharma and annihilating winds of time but it only brought me pain.  I’ve a better time of it these days. I’m not as mad but suffer a stasis and a tradeoff I’m not sure I’m ok with until I see others traipsing those same beat and nowhere roads of lust and alcoholism.  I’m doing pretty ok, considering. I’ve managed to self-publish a collection of poetry and sometimes prose, every year for the last 5, written countless letters, penned and posted 22 columns at The Coarse Grind and God knows how many blog posts here at Going For The Throat.  I’ve fed myself, kept myself warm and in walls.  I split from the longest gig I ever had, drove a stakebed through the Christian wasteland and been across the world, ending in the Land of Eternal Spring right before Christmas last year.  Everything’s great now that I’m sober and it’s the end of the world. Though sometimes I have strange and benevolent moments.

Moments flooded with enough gratitude to want the best for us all.  To resist devolving into selfishness and wonder of the other, and another universe besides my own sad orbit punching keys, drinking coffee and jerking off.  I’m doing what I always wanted to and when faced with the end and the end of all things I’m still doing it and doing it anyway. It feels good but it doesn’t feel great.  It doesn’t feel as good as first Fall days back home, when you know you’re in and the world will be dying awhile, the days are brisk and short and dark so you make it to her window and see her mulling wine by the stove.  She’s built like a Croatian revolutionary and you just want to come inside. The Fall and the Winter will do it to you. If you were raised with 4 seasons it will be your mythology and with you for the rest of your life. It’s the rush of things, the coarsing of things, dark blood in currents and real altars of bone and sky.  Dead leaves are a wild currency and gingko berries staining the wet pavement will buy for you from incredible and vast memory. This tangent is only to say that it’s always West Philly in my heart and I’m always in love. Everything felt so important then, even though I can’t remember–I was dying too back then, making greater mistakes but that’s precisely what I miss of youth and abandon, bourbon and poetry, furnace nights and streets with rushes of capillarity, streets wide and out that lead in…aw Hell, I’ve done it again.  Ain’t I? Lost in nostalgia and reverie, cheapening this moment because I’m teetotaling, responsible with a bedtime and typing this on a Friday morning, sipping honey-sweet dark coffee in my bathrobe alone.

I’ve nothing to offer better than memory of wild youth but only one without the hangups I don’t have in my normal everyday life now.  Know what I mean Good Reader? I look back to when I knew more, in my 20s, and I wish I could be so free but the truth is I’m freer now because I know that even then I was tortured.  I’m invested in nurturing myself and opt for deep solitude and real connection. I’m not involved in the chase and while it’s not as exciting I’ve heaps less suffering and misery and pain at my own dumb hands.  There are only a few takeaways you’ll get from a post like this–one being that blogging is passe. The other is that a writer writes and so I’m doing exactly what I should. Lastly I find it fascinating that as we’re hurled out of the blue and into the black I keep calling out and going back to those streets and those women whom I loved.  Chock, stout and deciduous love made in draped and perfumed vessels of their beds, locked and twisting and sweating the same sweat.  I know I stared into the great eye and was pushed and pulled through her aperture and that lying there as the trolleys squealed and cantilevered, and the oaks and gingkoes shook and unwound at the window, I know I knew Life, our struggle against each other to give the greatest pleasure from the rankest pain of being only ourselves, opening there, wide, even if death was waiting and would come closer and closer, I made love Good Reader.  It didn’t stop the end of the world or what’s coming now but I made love motherfucker. God damn. I made love.

JOIN JIM TRAINER NEXT MONDAY FEBRUARY 3rd AT BATCH FOR A SPECIAL NIGHT OF STORYTELLING, POETRY AND THE SPOKEN WORD.

PART 23 OF THE COARSE GRIND, MY MONTHLY COLUMN ON THE CREATIVE LIFE, IS LIVE THIS SUNDAY AT INTO THE VOID.

NO COMEBACKS BY WILL STENBERG AND 2031, JIM TRAINER’S SIXTH FULL-LENGTH COLLECTION OF POETRY, ARE AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH YELLOW LARK PRESS.
GET YOUR COPIES HERE.

SIGN UP TO RECEIVE AN ORIGINAL POEM EVERY WEEK.  JIM TRAINER’S POEM OF THE WEEK!