Confessions of a Jerkoff

The following post was written the Sunday before last, while in the midst of feeling like a failure.  

“You get your story and you hold onto it, and every time you tell it, you forget it more.”
-Laurie Anderson, Heart of a Dog

There’s nothing ironic about writing this at a Starbucks in downtown Austin while they play The Beatles.  The Beatles aren’t my favorite and neither is this coffee shop, but I’m left alone here.  It’s perfectly copacetic and American.  No haircuts, no 80’s music and plenty of space between me and the only other customer in here.  The Beatles are too terribly cute to resonate with me and my junkyard mind, but it’s not insufferable, certainly nothing earphones won’t fix and heaps better than the hipster coffee shop near the mansion.  I can never work there, can barely sit there without choking on good vibes with the urge to kill rising.  Which is all strangely prescient, being that the intention of this post is to demonstrate what a jerkoff I’ve been, and that in a slovenly state of mind even the universe can conspire to distract you, fuck you off and prevent you from getting the work done, if you let it.

The months following the publication of September and my return from Portland haven’t exactly been stagnant, but things never passed the speed of agony.  I’ve been busy but not busy enough.  I’ve kept up with gigs.  I did a book release at the mansion, performed for a packed house and sold some books. That week I appeared as the guest on Writing On The Air.  I was Chicon Street Poets featured reader in March and played their year anniversary as well as their presentation of Popsicle’s Departure 1989 by Maydee Distefano.  I was a featured reader of Blood Jet Poetry Series in New Orleans in March with great poet and friend Bernard Pearce.  I played a short set at the first Story Barn and my monthly gigs at the Airport.  I tagged along with fellow poet Brian Grosz and writer Kent Grosswiler Jr. for Writer’s Roulette and Spokenandheard at Kickbutt Coffee, and I opened the Ice Cream Social at the end of April.  I’m playing House Wine Thursday and then heading down to Houston the next day for Songwriters Roundtable Vol 8.  I’ve been able to support my community and made appearances at performances by Grosz and local favorite Nathan Hamilton.  I’ve been out to see Ebony Stewart read at the Bedpost Confessions‘ book release and also Testify semi-regularly.  I went to Joe Gray‘s first show on Wednesday and been listening to my homeboys on the Broad Street Breakdown.  I wrote poetry and posted a poem every day in April, kept that going throughout May.  I’ve had some poems featured in PoetryInk‘s 20th Anniversary Anthology as well as a tribute to Lamont Steptoe, and spoke and read at NSFW: Poetry For Wankers in May.  I’m sitting on about 10 new poems and hope to have them submitted by the end of June.  Meanwhile, I’ve submitted “You’d Be Alone Here Too” to the No Extra Words podcast and hope to get some stories together for submission to Backyard Story Night and Testify before we hit the road for upstate NY in July.  Lastly, I had some work appear in the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review and am thrilled to be featured in The Waggle Magazine again.  In my interview with Chicon Street Poets I mentioned that I hope to break into twelve new markets by 2017, including Boston and NYC in September.

If you think that I’m tooting my own horn, you’re goddamn right I am.  At the request of my therapist I’m doing away with thinking that I am not an Artist.  It was my mantra for a while- twenty years or so but who’s counting-but thanks to the professional help of a good therapist, I won’t need to think that way anymore.  Also it just ain’t true.  Point is, it’s become terribly necessary to toot my own horn.  Remind myself.  As much as I feel like a jerkoff, I’m still getting work done.  I’m not moving at the speed of my heroes and I may never.  The only way a little light’ll get in, and the only chance I have in this chase, is that I voice it, here and to the universe.  That even with the proof of shows and print and interviews and performances, I still feel nowhere.  And even though I’m not nowhere, and am in fact somewhere, I know I could do so much better.  If I can’t rightfully say that I’ve beat depression, I’ve certainly won the round.  I haven’t smoked a cigarette since December and I hardly ever have the urge to drink or drug.  The difficulty is this yearning for otherness.  I’m stable.  Clear.  And utterly boring.  This way of feeling reminds me of similar crossroads in my life when I knew I’d have to perform-do work or die.  I can only imagine that this time I’ll be able to hit unimagined heights.  I’ve got sobriety and health on my side.  A stable gig, money saved and lots of time.  I hope to see you on the road, good reader, and the next time I get up I plan on jamming this fucker all the way home.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE-MOONSTONE POETRY PRESENTS-JIM TRAINER, DON BAJEMA, MALEKA FRUEAN

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 11-13-13

Moonstone Arts Center Poetry Presents An Evening of Spoken Word and Poetry: Featuring Austin Poet and Singer/Songwriter Jim Trainer, Don Bajema and Maleka Fruean

Austin, Texas – What is a poet but someone who reshapes the listener’s perspectives and challenges the reader to think differently about the world. Vision is a subtle thing in the hands of those who express it well.

Jim Trainer expresses his vision through poetry.

good poetry

it’s hard to find
but it’s hard to find
a
diamond
in the dark
and
it’s
hard to find
a woman with a
heart of gold.
so what?
Rumi was drunk
on the
word of god
and Papa was just
drunk in Los Angeles
Levine wasn’t drunk
at all
and Dylan Thomas
drank it all.
good poetry
sings out
it finds you
it wins you.
good poetry
takes you out of
the arena
it re-doubles you
with an impossible
intimacy
it sends you
out into the wasted land
collecting grains of rice
with just a bowl
& a song.

Trainer lives with impossible – and impassioned – intimacy.

The stations of this poet’s cross have included time as a hardcore homeless punk; an acting student, a communications major, a late night freeform pirate radio DJ, a power washing remover of pigeon shit from I-95; a driver for touring metal bands; a landscaper in the projects of his native Philadelphia, a crew chief supervising underpaid hardworking minority men in converting an old candy factory into condos for the rich and largely white, and, as he recalls today, “a bartender at a pizza shop in Shitsmear, Delaware.”

Oh, yes, and a quite short stint as sexton in a Presbyterian church where he collected one, maybe two, paychecks.

Trainer’s, then, is a life led, not learned in a classroom. And he extracts from those varied experiences the essence of what it means to be a living, breathing, craving, wounded and compassionate soul in this world, mining the same rich veins that Bukowski did before him … Bukowski, who “not only showed me how to write (simply, yet profoundly), but also showed me how to live,” as Trainer notes.

Trainer, the poet, was trained by the poet Bukowski. And so it goes.

Other exemplars Trainer have turned to include poets Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine and Lamont B. Steptoe and songwriters such as Warren Zevon, John Lee Hooker, Cory Branan and Randy Newman.

So it’s not surprising that Trainer also is at home with a guitar and a harmonica, bringing his biting lyrics and bittersweet stories to life with the same fervor that defines his readings.

Now living in Austin, Texas, that so-called live music capital of the world, Trainer performs frequently in listening room venues, coffeehouses, wine bars and dive bars throughout the city. His 2010 recording “Swamp Demo” captures the unique sound he’s cultivated in the sonic soils of east coast guile and Americanish authenticity, and today, Trainer says “In the past, when something devastating or heartbreaking happened to me, I would be inspired to write a song and take refuge in music … Now that life isn’t a series of heartbreaks, I hope to move songwriting to the forefront and do it as regularly and daily as I write poetry.”

But it doesn’t stop there. The poet and performer is a communicator with a digital dais in the form of the blog, “Going For the Throat,” where he opines and pontificates on moods of the moment.

Also reading at the Moonstone Arts Center Event:

Maleka Fruean is a writer, publicist, community events coordinator, and artist. She has recently been named as one of the writers in residence at Big Blue Marble Bookstore in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. She’s created and organized events and programming for Big Blue Marble Bookstore, iMPerFEct Gallery, Torchlight Collective, and more, and has read her prose and poetry all the way from Tribes Gallery in New York to communal houses in West Philly. Her writing has appeared in Molotov Cocktail, WHYY News Works, Germantown Avenue Parents, Patch and Elevate Difference (formerly The Feminist Review).

Novelist, screenwriter, actor and spoken-word performer Don Bajema first came onto the literary scene in the early 90s with Boy In The Air (2.13.61). A proud son of Newfoudland, Canada and current resident of New York City, Bajema has toured extensively in the US, Canada and Europe, sharing the spoken word stage with the likes of Hubert Selby, Henry Rollins, and Jim Caroll. His latest collection of short stories, “Winged Shoes and a Shield”, was released in October 2012 by City Lights Books.

Moonstone Arts Center Poetry Presents An Evening of Spoken Word and Poetry featuring Maleka Fruean, Don Bajema and Jim Trainer.
7 pm Wedensday December 11 at Brandywine Workshop
728 S. Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19146

CONTACT: Jim Trainer: 512-203-6288
jamesmichaeltrainer@gmail.com,
jimtrainer.net
###

 

Thank You for Joining Me for National Poetry Month

Now this reminds me of my radio days
When I’d take the mic and leave rappers amazed
No matter how large, whether gold or platinum
I take my microphone and point the shit right at them
-Craig G, Going For The Throat

Aho.
I am featured in Apiary Magazine discussing one of my favorite poems in honor of National Poetry Month.  A poem of mine is featured in the 17th Annual Poetry Ink Anthology published by the Moonstone Arts Center.  Great writer Natalie Kelly is featuring My Beautiful Day, a poem of mine, on her awesome blog today.  I’ve submitted three poems to WragsInk for their next Anthology and we’re almost sold out of the second pressing of Farewell to Armor.  National Poetry Month has been good to me.

Aho.  30 days&nights drunk on Ale and screaming along with Randy Newman.  Feeling like I could live forever. A month spent scaling the highwire nights, burning down cigarillos and fortifying myself in a temple of smoke, polishing precious jewels of rage and humming haunted hymns onto the page.  I’ve still got a fucking brick of work to sort through before the Terrible Summer and I’ve got to come up with 3 poems to submit to the Philadelphia Poets Journal before days end.
I’ve manifested a life that serves the creation of Art.  I’ve staked this peak and now I can see the chain.  The slipshod condition of my inner Life and the mess of my heart were the price I paid.  Now that it ain’t all War anymore I turn my attention inward.  I look for peace within and I take the longview.

I don’t always take the time to tell you how much you mean to me.  How your support of me&my work is the blood and the road, the rope and the anchor.
May you know peace.  True&Lasting.  And if you’re called to fight I’ve always got your back.

Go forth and rebel.
-Blair Fox

See you on the streets motherfucker.
Jim Trainer

The Pain Of Editing

Welcome to the terrordome. The writing desk is the blast site. Cigarette ash, empty matchbooks, Ibuprofen, sunglasses and ripped jeans, boots and amp cords on the floor, hash pipe and typewritten poems/handwritten poems strewn around a bouquet of empties.
Editing’s a real motherfucker.  Kind of like a nervous breakdown. Luckily (for me), I have an editor. Her talent lies in being able to simultaneously deflect my sexual advances and somehow convince me to turn the music DOWN so that we can get some work done. All while holding a red felt-tip pen in her hand and a stack of work in her lap. Friday night’s editing session was epic. There was no shortage of empty bottles or tears but we managed to come up with one (1) poem to submit to the Moonstone Arts Center’s 17th Annual PoetryInk Anthology.  She tells me it’s a great poem and I can’t tell.  I’ll have to take her word for it. All I know is that the piece we came up with is complete. It speaks its own language and answers its own questions.  It’s unto itself, which is all I can really hope for.  Whether it was good or bad was beyond me but we were on deadline&I was getting drunk. Editing never gets any easier.
What’s worse, having a book published and my work accepted has changed things. It’s been a game changer.  See, I’m of the odd ilk who prefer opposition.  We like struggling in obscurity and yelling at the mountain. It’s hard to accept that the work is good without having to bleed it, or myself, for a while. Basically it’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.

The piece we came up with is a plain-spoken poem, written around Christmas time, the day after I got back from Philly. There’s no magic in it and perhaps that’s ok.   A poem doesn’t always have to contain an epiphany or chronicle some precious change. Sometimes moments are heavy as lead and there are no windows in the wall. A beat dog may hang his head long after the abuse. He’ll keep his tail between his legs for a while but, he’ll learn. He’ll get accustomed to it being easy. He’ll find himself comfortably nestled on a warm floor in the mansion with his belly full and he’ll learn. He’ll learn not to react to the sudden, loud protests of the writer yelling at his editor while trying to take her to bed&throwing empty bottles at her head.

WAR IS HELL BUT RECON IS A MOTHERFUCKER
-Military Saying

chaos puts me to sleep
–Swift Ships