The world hasn't been very nice to you, has it?
(For shame, world, for shame.)
It's easy to see as you pour your soul onto the page
that you cannot claim happiness with complete honesty.
And yet...
still you seem to touch a part of me
reserved for my hope in hopeless cases
(namely, myself)
that allows me to believe
that if you,
who seems to have been going strong
for so long,
can continue on...
then why shouldn't I?
You write plainly about pain,
and openly about endings,
but yet...
there is still some element,
some undercurrent,
that speaks of peace in the end,
and a kernel of grace
that can be grasped even in the dark,
at the bottom of a well without the rope to save oneself.
That not only despite your hardships,
but even because of them you can
keep putting one foot in front of the other,
ignoring the broken glass that litters the tar-stained road
representing the adversity you have had to hurdle up to this point
that seems to be the crux of your art,
only serves to provide in me a means to fan a flame
that I thought to have almost gone out.
It saddens me that your pain
is the means to my renewed determination,
but I can't help being gratefully, desperately hopeful.
Because if you can keep living
with the weight on your shoulders
procured over the length of your life
shouldn't I
who has lived half as long
with half as much strife
still be able to struggle on
with my own modest poetry?

In summary,
your words have touched me deeply, Mister Jason James,
and you will never know the depths of my gratitude.
Hope is a hard-won commodity,
and you have succeeded in planting a sprig of it
in my hopeless poet's soul.

h.f.m.