Long Cold Winter

-for Maureen

For decades you paraded as a crazy bitch
wretchedness your lucky charm
hung on a bracelet
displayed on your arm.

Greetings. Trainer here. Taking yet another stab at pure writing and hoping it could be of some use to you, good&cherished Reader. Also, I’d like to welcome some new folks into the ranks, as my readership and likes on Facebook have more than doubled in the last week.
What can I say? It’s been a long cold winter, eh Brother? And Shit is Grim. Some of you have endured enough tragedy to last a lifetime this winter; while others (like me) have had it no easier, our bad blues wrenching the sotted nights and giving no quarter but making even the sunlight brutish and mean.

I’m beginning to see the light.
-The Velvet Underground

Hold on my people. We may have buckled under it and had to surrender to altars of ruin, but a great strength was uncovered in these grim times and a vulnerability, too. It may be high time for us to forgive-another, ourselves, our parents-whatever. And forgiveness may just be the opening we’re looking for.
Not only is hell real but hell is a place!
-The Field Recordings of Alan Lomax, Land Where the Blues Began

Indeed we’re called to praise feeling the hammer of the daisies beat up through the hard dead ground. Called to praise as the yellow lark quietly lights down and sits with us as if to laugh at our foolish loss in only the most honest and cruel way. Whatever it was or is that had us stanchioned up on the high, frozen wires of isolation has ultimately only made our love strong. Shit’s Been Hard. For real. But it’s only made me love you more and miss you even more than words could tell and has me looking forward to when we’ll meet again, so desperately, someday.
Indeed my pain has tossed out the alabaster rooms and our hateful dawns apart have razed the horizon impossibly bare. Fact is I got beat down with it, pretty bad and I ran the full gamut of my defenses. I pulled out all the stops and it wasn’t until I truly surrendered that I could finally molt myself out of this bitter, old skin.

The irony’s not lost on me that it’s ol Grim Jim bringing you some good news for a change. There was a time when I would have told you that life is a continual loss, a continual moving away from what we love and only towards death-the only and great absolute, death-that terrible godhead of the stalwart truth in an inauthentic world gone mad.

Well I guess I am still telling you that but also, reveal yourself.
Didn’t we deserve a look at you the way you really are?
-Shellac
That’s right. Ol Grim Jim’s back from the dead to tell you to open yourself up to it, Brother. Feel it all. Let it wash over you and pull you from your mula dara back to black, take it all in and never lose sight of that dark nest behind you. But also-turn now away from the West, and face forever now the Dawn of the Great Eastern Sun.
It is from within the terrible claw of loss that my heart now beams through. And it is to this wisdom that I am now endeared,

there is no love to be attained
this humble house has many rooms
to feel pain but never be pain
has taught me how to welcome you.