Oh Happy Day

 

No more fertile ground for Hope exists 

Than in a land living in Despair.

Got up on the down side of the bed yesterday morning. The first words I thought were something akin to the above. My second thought was I probably should not watch the news this morning............. So I thought writing poetry might soothe my anxiety. 

I came up with the first two lines in a jiffy. They just fell out of my brain and onto the page. A few moments of clarity later I came up with:

All hope is never lost. 

It is only misplaced.

And then I ran into turbulence. It seemed I had written a beginning and an ending with nothing in the middle. The next five or six lines were written, scratched out, moved up, moved down, and eventually kicked out. Any clarity I had was gone, leaving only the residual ashes of its passing. Instead of shit canning my effort to that point, I created the Facebook message above and posted it. 

A half assed effort beats a blank I guessed. I made some coffee and forgot about it.

This morning my eyes popped open at 3:00 AM. I felt neither down nor up. I was just awake and could not go back to sleep. I tried, but failed. And then I remembered that last night was the first night my coughing from a recent cold had not interrupted my sleep. I had successfully slept for over five hours straight. 

Oh Happy Day.

I considered returning to my recent fragments of the poem from yesterday. While I was considering, I scrolled through my Facebook comments, hates, and likes. Someone had liked my picture message from yesterday. I punched it up so I could remind myself what I had posted. 

I did like it, even after 24 hours. But I felt it was incomplete. So I created a collage that incorporated the only lines of that poem I had saved as being worthy of any consideration of any kind. What I came up with was this:

And that is what will carry me through my day today. A message that no matter how fucked up things might seem, I can count on them changing. Nothing lasts forever, not even bad times.

Later ...........................................

______________________

Musical choice this beautiful morning was uncharacteristically harder than it should have been. I immediately considered almost any song by Donovan. The man wrote the most upbeat music of my youth. My mistake was trying to find a Donovan song that was narrowly focused enough to fit the above message collage. .............. After listening to too many Donovan tunes, I came upon "Sunshine Super Man". Hmm.......... Almost, but not quite. 

I re-played "Season of the Witch" and realized it was the tune. But instead, of the original with Donovan, I was about to pick a great cover by Mike Bloomfield, Stephen Stills and Al Kooper on their "Super Sessions" album. 

Their cover was fantastic. But I retraced my steps and also chose the original "Season of the Witch" . Instead of one choice, I am offering two versions of the same song.  Enjoy .............