I’m whittled I’m sharpened, fine I’ll heat seek you I can find you blind I’m feeling like Kevin James “…glad I left LA…” I keep a number by your name it gets smaller every day I covet your end and I pass the hours burning hearts out of playing cards
this is the midnight of my life
I’ve got ears planted everywhere I’ll heat seek you, I can find you blind Midnight of my life and I’m halfway there from the first dawn to the last one
the first dawn you were painted on I cut the soft ash from the mercury the next dawn the final one your secret’s out ended the mystery
this is the midnight of my life
I’ve got ears planted everywhere I’ll heat seek you, I can find you blind Midnight of my life and I’m halfway there from the first dawn to the last one
first dawn to the last one first dawn to the last one
We know why, right? How come I’ve come here and got it down? I wrote my way through. If you could’ve saw my knuckles typing they’d be white. I’ve been at this desk for over a year now, well–at this location anyway. 13 months I been at the wide, green window, usually in the morn but lately at night–confessing, venting, vexing, dressing up and getting down the annals of a major depressive disorder. 13 months here and 6 months in Crestwood, 6 months in Hyde Park and 5 years at the broad, oaken table working as a live-in caregiver and at the cushest gig I ever had. 10 years in total. Try and fuck with that.
This column was my counselor and my talisman. You joined me in the bright morning or by lamplight and bared witness as I festooned 600 words like a harpoon and from the deep blue-black hit at the leviathan or anyway got swallowed and wrote from the belly of a whale. What can I say, Good Reader? We won. Persistence is key. That and using your weaknesses. Guess that would make them strengths ain’t it and so we did some gris-gris beautification here, we turned it out and hung it on the wall.
I always wanted to be a writer but could never leave the daygig for too long. I had some good stretches, living with Laura on Rockwell Road in Abington PA and a couple months Spring before last in Mid City and Varzulitsa, Holland and Berlin. The most formative probably in Oak Run at Bat Manor, sending letters out and drinking at the Whip In bar, bringing up the sun with a raven-hair in a dirty pool and shucking jives dressed like a Hershey’s Kiss on campus. Those days were my best if not without fear. It may be a particular and distinctive joy that writers get when they discover they are one. A writer. It invokes a destiny, makes pitfalls comic or at least the endeavors something to endure. It drove the characters to collide and storytellers are dealing in the basic units of human consciousness. Best of all writing makes you the hero try and fuck with that.
It seems I’m shook by the same old fears. Good Reader. These fears haven’t been good to me. This rigged game running for the money and the flesh has been harder on me maybe than it should’ve been, but I took it on because, well–I don’t know why. I just know I’ve been terrified and never lived down, freezing on the streets just outside my hometown. I probably could’ve chose wiser then. Stayed in Community College and lived with my Mom instead of sleeping in the park. It always had to be the hardway though I don’t know if that will ever change. I do know that I made it through, another 7 on a stitch, and 5 on clock and under. We both know making a living is neither and the hard truths don’t give any quarter as we grow older. The last decade’s unwinding and The America’s rolling over. It’s sure been nice though, being with you, every week through these final years. Checking in over the callous and shameful turns we made it through, week after week and were together, here, for the last 10 years and isn’t that nice?
I might be wrong but I don’t think you write to impress, I think you write because you mean it.It’s not a “please read how smart I am” thing, which bores me. It’s not dishonest and predictable.I feel more of a “I needed to write this” feeling from your writing. It’s confidence, but in your product, not yourself. -Barbara J. Many
This coffee is as big as my forearm. It’s hot and black with honey. The sun is coming up and I’m at my desk. Where else? It bothers me to have something in the can but have to write anyway. Bother is a strong word, more like hesitate, and “have to write” after all these years isn’t in the lexicon nor even the realm of possibility. I didn’t have to write all those 643 posts for the last 10 years, there was something bothering me sure you bet motherfucker, but the truth is I had to do something and I chose to write. Much as I’m choosing now, I mean, I could just go to work or spend more precious time sipping this forearm-sized cup of coffee and doomscroll while I pretend to listen to NPR, but whatever this piece I’m writing now could be would bother me. It’d grip the gut and bloom in red blood and suck back to blue-black. You know, dread. That special Final Century brand that survivors such as we learned to keep in check and not go out on a limb and lose our mind on a Wednesday and that is suddenly a flare and firing I’d venture at least once a news cycle. Truth is the big business of news reporting is made up of people, too. People like me and you who’ve got bills to pay, so–why not? Shock doctrine sells. The Carny in Chief. We watch, we listen and scroll ’cause it’s got us by our flight-or-flight and so with our attention we buy. They make their bones and we ours. I suppose we could choose to fight, but whom or what? It could be so easy to be a Proud Boy, wake up in the morning and go to bed at night with an enemy in mind but too easy, maybe. We’ll find out soon enough ain’t it, but my point is…well–Barbara Jean is right I don’t want to get cute here or ever. I’ll leave the pandering to the infotainment purveyors and a simple truth to those armed chowder-whites champing at a Fourth Reich. I write because it’s the only thing that calms my guts and I post here every Thursday because I said I would.
It’s my own special blend of accountability, intermixed with fear of failure and an incomplete sense of self, that compels me to the page. Once I get here I’m alright and you too, Good Reader–once we both know what the fuck I’m on about we can just be together and isn’t that nice? I said I would post and so here I am. And I got 1002 words in the can yesterday but I’m going to save them for this Sunday’s Grind. It’s a drop-in written like these posts are here–personal journalism without edifice or attempt at objectivity. It goes for the throat and it announces the Throat antho so it’s perfect for this Sunday’s Grind. When I turned 40 I told you I’d be publishing a collection every year for 10. Nothing’s changed, we’re coming up on Yellow Lark Press 006 and though I’d some idea I did not expect us to be so close to the chipper blades of history. 2031 came out last year and gave us 11 years. I couldn’t see anything worse than ecological collapse and so I wrote about it, compiled and edited the collection and put it out. Now it’s something else ain’t it, though it’s fitting to be releasing a collection on the estranging development of a personal journalist at the teetering edge of the Last Decade and fraught with the dysfunction and peccadilloes uncovered after self-medicating with alcohol and cigarettes as an Ex-pat punkrocker and womanizing Hunter Thompson wannabe for the last 10 years down in the Pearl of the South. Plus if a collection of poetry ruminating on the melted atmosphere and lack of O2 choking us out of the human experiment can get published then mote it be. Ain’t it. I made deadline then and I’ll make it now. And I’ve still got almost half this cup off coffee left.
Curator at Going For the Throat, columnist for Into The Void, progenitor of stand-up tragedy™. Jim Trainer publishes a collection of poetry every year through Yellow Lark Press. To sign up for Jim Trainer’s Poem Of The Week, visit jimtrainer.net.
Jim Trainer is a communicator. Growing up in the hardcore scene of the early 90’s taught him everything he needed to know about real work. Jim Trainer believes in rock and roll. It may be our only salvation in this dark world. He’s carried the torch for independent media, broadcasting ... Continue reading →
Going for the Throat 