From OUT OF THE BLUE
Fringe Benefits
I remember when the people from HR
would come before us, twice a year,
as regular as clockwork—this was when
Bush père was president—and say, “You can have
half of what you used to have, for the same amount,
or what you have now, for twice as much money.
We call this Flexible Benefits, or Maximum Choice.”
Only now it’s the Congress. It’s Medicare. It’s
a bill of rights, a bill of wrongs, a bill of goods,
as Wright Morris says. Who’s Wright Morris?
Saturday Night in America
I am listening to the radio.
Saturday Night in America.
Big Band music. The very songs
the band at Fort DeRussey played
in Honolulu 40 years ago, when
President Kennedy was assassinated.
A San Miguel beer was 20¢ in the NCO Club.
You could buy a porterhouse steak the size of
a motorcycle seat for $2.50. I hadn’t started writing yet,
but knew I was going to be a writer when I grew up.
It was important to remember everything that happened to me.
And now I am one, as sure as Ernest Hemingway. Kurt Vonnegut says
a writer cleans the birdshit out of the cuckoo clocks. I am not
a secular humanist I am a logical positivist.
Déjà Vu
I used to, I worked right here. In the same office, in fact.
I drove over Hathaway Bridge in my old Datsun B210.
I was writing a winch manual on AMCM countermeasures
equipment, and now I am working on an O-level maintenance manual
with IPB for the rewinder, or reeling machine. It was like Thanksgiving
the day I got the job. I came up in November, on a reconnaissance sortie,
and found a job in February. A good job for this area. It took me longer
when I moved back, from Atlanta, but here I am, as John Hartford says
about the earthquakes in California. "I'm still here." Us hippies
ain't going nowhere. Bush is the Military-Industrial Complex
President Eisenhower warned us about. The forces
of darkness and the forces of light.
Shades of Richard Nixon.
Did you see the jowls
on that son of a bitch.
Multi-Tasking
I remember when IBM announced a program called TopView.
It didn't work. Or it worked, but it wouldn't work with the network,
or the expanded memory capability of DOS. And it was slow, and
a resource hog, and the GUI was counterintuitive. Microsoft
was lean and mean, and beat them to the punch, with Windows.
We'll get the bugs out in the next release. The first product
to get a foothold in the market wins. There is a narrow window.
Whenever cost or schedule conflict with quality, quality prevails.
Would you like to buy some property in the Everglades, or
the Brooklyn Bridge?
Multi-Tasking
Brew wrote a screenplay once called Contest Writing - Championship Style.
In it, a man used the Shift-F3 keys on his computer to go from the document
he was being paid to write to a book he was writing on the sly. On company time,
using company equipment. His cube-mate could tell which one he was working on
by how fast he typed. When he got to blazing away, she would say, "I know what
you're do-ing." But she didn't rat him out. It was them against the front office.
When he heard footsteps he would switch. The bossman was like a motorcycle cop
behind a billboard. They knew what he was up to but they couldn't catch him.
Why can't Hulk think? Because Hulk is a hero in a comic book.
I changed the name of The Daily Bugle to The Daily Bulletin
so no one would think I was copying Spider-Man.
30 Years of Living Dangerously
The jackrabbit or the papa-san
waits until the last possible instant
to dart across the road in front of
the semi or the weapons carrier.
You don’t want to leave the wrong poem
in the xerox machine, or send something to
the printer, only to have it malfunction,
then burp the incriminating evidence up,
later, to a bossman, or the lackey of
a bossman, the informer, or sharp tool
for the company, the sycophant, the me and you
are pals—huh, Spike?, the brown-nose kiss-ass
careerist, or strainer, as Manfred’s Granny called them.
Odor, o-no. Comes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush.
The Writer Regrets
I’m sorry but
the volume of rejection slips I receive
does not permit an individual reply to your
snotty, disdainful missive. You are not right
for me. I lack enthusiasm for your hidebound mindset
in this difficult publishing environment. Perhaps another writer
will feel differently. There’s the honor rolls and the beauty pageants.
Sorority girls going down for a fraternity pin. Fraternity boys
getting married for a piece of ass. Careerists. Nelson Algren said
no one should be a literary agent just because she wants to be one.
Many are called but few are chosen. Keep trying.
Even a blind pig finds an acorn
once in a while.
Just follow
the pack.
Third Mate
One time Potter wrote a short story
for Tyrone’s Hogtown Hooter regional magazine
(Pretty Michelle was the brains behind that outfit),
the punch line of which was, “Ha ha, there is no
third mate on a head boat I’m a deckhand.”
We killed the grouper and red snapper that day.
He’s on the left, I’m on the right.
A garbo asked Potter for a life jacket, and he said,
“What for—all they do is make your titties sore.”
Sportsman
A garbo is a native of L. A.
(Lower Alabama) who comes down
to the Redneck Riviera, rents a room,
and fishes for a week. He buys a plastic
GI can at K Mart and fills it full of mingo snapper
and motel ice. From vermilion. Called beeliners,
in Panama City. On the way home, he throws
the lot in a side ditch, pink water, rotten fish,
and all. The opposite of a conservationist.
Homeland Security
Should holiday travelers be concerned with terrorist attacks
this Thanksgiving weekend? Yes. And gas prices, Disneyworld,
especially the commercials. Strontium-90 in the atmosphere
from the Americans and the Russians blowing off atomic bombs.
Bush had decided to withdraw from Iraq a month before he was assassinated.
Don’t want to put those two words together on the Internet, the software will come
looking for you like an earwig crawling in your ear or a carneira swimming up
your urethra when you piss in the Amazon River. Who knows what evil lurks
in the hearts of men? Sad days are these in Passaic. The Shadow don’t.
The Shadow is Victor Jory, for Christ’s sake.
Percy Dovetonsils, where are you now that we need you?
Fuck this “Springtime for Hitler” shit. The situation is serious.
Do you feel safer, now that Monkey Boy is in? Space Balls, the movie.
Permanent waves, a boutonniere, cuff links, a string of pearls.
The host, adjusting the knob for his guests. Mixing the martinis.
Did I miss something? The Military-Industrial Complex
is alive and well in academia. Look like one of those
Dip Wars parties, where faculty wives made dueling guacamoles
while faculty men talked business, were chatted up by flirting coeds,
that’s how the patronage was handed out, Nuala O’Faolain says.
Jesus H. Statistical Christ, Kathleen.
From DISTANCE LEARNING
Anger Management Issues
Patient denies having rage
about his lack of literary recognition,
claims his outlook is "always merry
and bright." Says he has nothing against
Haitians, even though he calls their religious
practices "ululating," and "jabbering in
their heathen tongue." Ought to send them back
to Africa. No, that's the indigenous blacks.
Is he xenophobic towards the Century Village
New York Jews, who view a Florida cracker as
an ignorant hick? Of course not. Your deli man
in Brooklyn was also mine. My prune is yours.
Philip Larkin was a racist, maybe, but he didn't get laid
until he was 41 years old, in the annus mirabilis between
the lifting of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles’ first lp.
Madonna on Oprah talking about authorship.
Bricoleur
Once Brenda becomes adept at transcribing medical records
she can telecommute. Work from home. Every day will be
Casual Friday, dress-code-wise. No race or battle-of-the-sexes
jokes at the water cooler, no office politics, no jockeying for position,
wondering if you hockied in your own nest with that one, Jack, having to
network and form alliances, exchange theory in the work of Marcel Mauss,
an earlier edition of French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, is she
a Freudian, a Marxist, a cultural evolutionist à la Leslie A. White
at Michigan, a bureaucratic hydraulic despotic elitist (rice paddies
in the Orient, cf. Wittfogel). I distance-teach, sailing my philippics,
jeremiads, and pasquinades out into the howling void of cyberspace.
Joe Mac called the HRAF at Yale (Human Relations Area Files)
the Human Relationships Area Code, and he got a masters degree
in anthropology from FSU. Few are called but many are chosen.
If you truly have a call, you're screwed, Camerado.
The ones who don't are sharpening the knives for you.
Teachers, learners, incense-burners.
I’m still here, John Hartford says,
about the California earthquakes.
Dancing on a platform of my own construction.
¾” marine plywood, salvaged from the county dump.
A knacker in an abattoir, put together out of scrap.
Navel Lint
I wasn't really ABD
(all-but-dissertation),
although I had completed
my course work and passed
the comps in every area except
my specialty, North American Archeology
(not just the Southeastern United States).
Once you get the union card you specialize.
Dale McCall knew a man who was an expert on
uterine scars in shrews. Do you know how big
a shrew's uterus is? Picture Pee Wee Herman
holding his fingers close together and saying, "Tiny."
The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Redacted
Why do you write redacted on certain headings
in your online journal (OLJ)? First of all,
it is the great long continuous book
of my life, 40-Year Run, a novel.
Journal entries are just a part of it.
Ezra Pound made Laughlin put
the black lines of the censor in
his Cantos. Hemingway wrote unprintable,
in places where he could not use the word
he wanted to. He drew attention to
the absurdity of such restrictions.
Expletive deleted sums it up.
One can guess the exact term
from the context, so who is fooled,
whom protected, from what? Dirty words?
Thoughts? A feeble attempt at mind control?
A sense of modesty, decorum, punctilio?
Manners? Advice to the lovelorn?
Brew wrote a column once called "Ask Doktor Dork,"
for the newsletter KorporateKulture.Kom (KKK).
From what the old NCOs called an early Quality Control
program, Zero Defects. Zelda Dork. We put the K
in kwality. Around the time that Lucent stock
went from $84 a share down to so low they were almost
delisted from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Good morning, may we Marfak your car?
This is my brother-in-law's car, Marfak you.
Have you had it in an olive, the oral polio vaccine?
The good news is you don't have polio. The bad news is
you have SIV. Simian immunovirus. You pays your money
and you makes your choice. Syphilis or yaws.
Team Jack-and-Brenda
All this hoopla about a possible pandemic
made Brew remember Gerald Ford's swine flu
immunization program, the old people dropping like flies
after coming to the position of attention to salute.
You don't have polio, you have SIV.
A social disease. You get it from
a mosquito bite, like West Nile Virus.
Thoughts have wings, say the Rosicrucians.
A hickey on his neck with perfect bite marks
in the center from the vampire, B-movie actress,
striptease-dancer (ecdysiast), and titty-picture model
Glori-Anne Gilbert, whose fan club Brew was a member of.
Brenda took their picture behind closed curtains
at Glamourcon 1999, his cameraperson, paparazzo,
and breastplate of righteousness.
A girlfriend of Balder's (who didn't make the cut)
saw the snapshot, which Brew had made into school-picture-sized
prints to distribute to his readership, and said, "Who's that?"
"My dad," Balder said. Pause. "My mom took the picture."
Garage Band Books
The censor was the Roman magistrate
who took the census. There is thus
a normative component to what is banned,
and what celebrated. The Greek word for ostracize
is from potsherd. Used in the balloting. Banishment
tantamount to death, in primitive societies.
And no bed of roses in our own.
You have to be strong in your mind,
Monk said. Anything you have to do,
you have to go on and do yourself,
Rahsaan Roland Kirk said. Mingus said,
"Bird's not dead, he's hiding out.
And he'll be back with some new shit
that will scare everyone to death."
Bob Weinstock, who recorded Bird
(and Monk, and Mingus, although not Kirk,
I don't believe, Lucky Thompson, homeless
on the streets of Seattle) for Prestige
inscribed a book to me, "To Jack `Bird' Saunders."
I helped him to self-publish it. Disintermediate now.
Publish it yourself. They can't cut me off because
they don't know where I'm getting it.
Reeds and Deeds
Lucky Thompson was disgruntled
about the way white record company
owners treated black jazz artists,
and was outspoken about it.
Ended up on the streets of Seattle,
homeless. Douglas Fairbairn (Street 8)
had Alzheimer's Disease, and died
not knowing he had been an author.
Dodo Marmarosa considered himself
a musician, to the end, and practiced.
Kept his chops up. For whom did he play,
in his lonely room? That's the $64 question.
I have a lady in the balcony, doctor.
Give her a good swiving, you sexist pig.
Germaine Greer tore Norman Mailer
a new asshole. Jesus, I loved to write.
Bukowski, upstairs with his typer, listening
to Mahler on the Alps of Night.
Not Invented Here
Bukowski listening to Mahler on the Alps of Night,
upstairs with his typer, the good German wine,
no more rotgut, no more flophouses, disreputable whores,
a woman in a gingham dress, a BMW, a house in the suburbs
with a swimming pool, camera crews from Germany, Belgium,
an interviewer from Italy, when he was on Bernard Pivot's
Bouillon de Culture, on French TV, shitfaced to the scuppers,
he walked off, didn't even get to answer what his favorite cuss word was.
Came into the states from overseas, had two books on the top-ten list
at the same time in Brazil, big in Europe, Spain, bus stations in Portugal,
the prophet is not without honor, save in his native land.
New York is so provincial it can't stand itself.
Someone might be gaining on them.
And they call me a hick.
Just because I am self-taught
doesn't mean I cannot do it.
POV
When the psychologist gave Roddy McDowall
a Rorschach Test in Lord Love a Duck,
he was supposed to see something sexual,
but instead claimed to see "butterflies."
"You're hostile, you little creep," the woman said.
But what if that is what he actually saw?
Why would he lie about it? Art brut translates
outsider art, but you could also call it mental patient art.
Who's to say what anybody else can see from his angle of vision,
just because we can't see it from ours? Enema vérité is what you see
on the end of the fork when you really look. Sometimes to actually see
what's on the fork we have to eat with chopsticks. POV stands for
privately-owned vehicle. Prevent FOD (foreign-object damage).
The errant bolt sucked up the air intake.
Or thrown there as an act of sabotage.
To destroy an
employer’s property
or hinder the
manufacturing process.
To subvert. You bureaucratic hydraulic despotic elitist, you.
Huh?
Madonna on Oprah
talking about authorship
(of children's books),
agency, empowerment,
did you sleep your way
to the top, dear, trade on your
good looks, were you audacious,
could you suck the chrome off a trailer hitch,
like Eva Peron, have you no sense of irony?
No pudeur, or shame? No modesty?
Is it me who's crazy? We're looking for people
who want to write. There's a future for you
in cartooning. Have you thought about show business
for a career? There's no business like it,
to coin a phrase. Is that Irving Berlin
or George Gershwin? Syphilis or yaws?
Ahead, the cliff, at one's heel, the wolf.
Go ahead and make the leap, like Buster Keaton,
or Frederico Fellini, who could fly. Maybe you'll land
in the top of a tree. Maybe they'll give you an homage
at the Cannes Film Festival for your body of work,
or the National Book Awards vote you a Lifetime Achievement Award
for your Contribution to American Letters. This year's taken
(Stephen King). But there's always next year.
Race Matters
I think Madonna should get
a National Book Award for her body of work,
or either a contract with Hallmark Greeting Cards,
like Maya Angelou, Lifetime Professor of This or That
at Wake Forest University, blackness, Negritude, conspicuous display,
colored person in the window, good thing Brew was able to expurgate himself,
and not go online for everyone and John Ashcroft to see at his web site
with the N word, the race card, to paraphrase William S. Burroughs,
if he had one, he'd play it, wouldn't you? A Florida cracker will make do.
Just because she's a pop diva is no reason to exclude her.
Brew's Dream
I'd like to charter the Lady Anderson
for a Twilight Cruise and Fried Shrimp Dinner.
Play What You Brung. I would invite the Buzzard Cult
and the Clampettes (not Dreadheads), a First Annual
Jack Saunders Memorial Pick-In. When I win
a genius grant, or sign a multi-book contract.
Body of Work
The top three hits
for madonna, at Amazon.com,
are The English Roses, Mr. Peabody's Apples,
and Madonna Nude 1979. Her body of work
thus includes pictures of herself naked.
I am the man, I suffered, I was there,
Walt Whitman said. I kept asking Brenda,
"What happened to her phony British accent?"
Hankering, gross, mystical, empowered.
A figure model who made good.
The Pearl Bailey Chair of shitty music.
Apologies to Dr. Maya Angelou.
Lie Down with Dogs, Get Up with Fleas.
Sad days are these in Passaic,
Ernie Kovacs says, as Percy Dovetonsils,
lisping poet. An ascot and a cold martini,
a smoking jacket, blow-out patches
on the elbows, a pipe, like Max von Sydow
in some Bergman movie, ha ha, think he could
make a living writing verse, it is to laugh.
Might as well expect to be Akira Kurosawa
directing Toshiro Mifune in Sanjuro.
The Maya Angelou collection, Life Mosaic.
Any bonds, today? Pardon me, but ain't you
Michael Jordan? Bugs Bunny, at your service.
Guilty As Charged
Stop the presses, Chief.
I have a story here
that’s going to break this town
wide open. Who do you think
owns this newspaper, son?
Was Brew crazy? If he had a race card
he would play it. Wouldn’t you?
I wouldn’t. At least, I haven’t.
So I am accused, by someone who did,
does, of white privilege. Against which
there is no defense. Methinks the lady
doth protest too much.
Start at the pointing finger
and trace it back.
The bigot in our midst
is you.
Art Brew, P. O. O. T. S.
The Florida Artists Directory,
from which educationists select people to be
Poets-in-the-School (P. I. T. S.) weighed Art Brew’s work
in the balance and found it unacceptable, or inappropriate.
He got the two confused. So he started practicing what
he called distance-teaching, at his web site on the Internet.
A poet out of the schools (P. O. O. T. S.).
Beans, beans, the musical fruit.
The more you eat, the more you toot.
Holy frijole, a Mexican jumping bean.
Any racists in the audience?
Male chauvinists? Pigs?
How could he disguise
his whiteness?
Shapeshifter III
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They got Brew to be the Santa at the company
Employee Children Christmas party. He kept thinking of
the barmaid in Bad Santa taking Billy Bob Thornton out in the parking lot
and screwing his brains out in a car, saying, “Fuck me, Santa, Fuck me, Santa,”
it made Brew feel like some kind of a sex object.
Bad Santa
Rep. John Dingell, D. Mich., described
the Medicare Reform Bill, or either
the machinations leading to its passage,
as "a Special Interest Saturnalia." One thinks
of Anaïs Nin and Hugo, visiting the whorehouse,
in Henry and June, to watch two prostitutes
having sex, and later, on the street, souls grown
shallow, tepid, displaced Africans in Picasso masks.
Les Mademoiselles d'Avignon, clowns in Santa suits,
I, Pagliacci, verismo opera, snail operculum earrings
in the Court of Louis Seize, the barmaid in Bad Santa,
I was afraid I'd get an affliction, and tried to think
of aversion therapy, where they show a child molester
a picture of a nymphet, or a nymph, and if he is aroused,
inappropriately, as one says, he receives an electric shock
through the penile cuff, like Steve Martin in the movie
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Take that, you filthy pervert.
Ho Ho Ho
The disc jockey at the company party,
hamburger cook at the picnic, a tub of beer,
a fish fry, Team Player awards, a gift certificate
to a restaurant one wouldn't eat at if it were free.
No beer now, soft drinks, bottled water, no tea,
no coffee, possibly herb tea, everyone in a 12 Step Program,
on a diet, recovering from this or that, a few relapsers,
hard cases, the 10% that didn't get the word, or got the word
and wouldn't heed it, wild hairy asses, recalcitrants, sawtooth-wave
recidivists, backsliders, demolition experts, both UDT and EOD,
bomb squad members, a task force, a SWAT team, jackboots, the knout,
poor Hedda Nussbaum, whips and chains, Merry Christmas, kiddies,
have some punch and cookies. Santa doesn't feel good.
Santa is dyspeptic. He calls Christmas
The Feast of Bad Conscience.
Bah, humbug.
Additional Duty
Brew got the duty,
Brew was issued the suit,
he had to sign a hand receipt,
and have it dry cleaned, afterwards,
including the signature cap, for cooties--
the red elastic pants for pubic lice?--
the fake boot-tops wouldn't fit over
his massive calves, like Jouko Ahola
in Werner Herzog's Invincible, so he cut
a slit in the back, under the fake fur,
and safety-pinned the gap in his red tunic
over his big rumbling belly where it puckered.
Jakeleg and jury-rigged. Santa reports as ordered, sir.
Jesus, I hate Christmas.
Bah Humbug
Dickens wrote a Christmas story
every year and dreaded it like the plague,
or gout, a Stilton with a bottle of Madeira
in the top, a cigar from Nicaragua, a hat,
"Genuine Panama," virgin vinyl, faux fur,
we need a volunteer to play Santa Claus
at the Employee Children Christmas Party.
W. C. Fields said any man who hates
dogs and children can't be all bad.
You. The fickle finger of fate
has landed on Art Brew.
Silent Night. Silent Night.
Silent but deadly courtroom creeper.
Low tide at the oasis. Your camel had diabetes.
(A chemical analysis of Egyptian beer.)
Low-Bottom Drunks
Brew went to an AA meeting
of motorcycle crazies, Sobriety in the Wind,
no booze, no dope, no weapons,
a man who looked like Hagar the Horrible
got up and said, "I hate fucking Christmas,"
and everyone agreed. Earth People are such hypocrites.
Setting an Example
I once went to a Christmas dinner
at the halfway house, for men,
Palm Trail Lodge, with Brenda
and the boys, on our bicycles,
as a conspicuous example of recovery.
Many of the men had passed the white-knuckle stage,
in detox, and were in the Pink Cloud phase.
But that was always dangerous, especially around
the holidays. One could get overconfident. Complacent.
Or be overwhelmed by bonhomie and not give a shit
about the consequences of a slip. I was hanging in there.
And they could too. If they didn't drink and went to meetings.
The Poorhouse Fair
I remember alcathons, this time of year,
at the American Legion, on Federal Highway--
the vets rented out their hall to Alcoholics Anonymous--
where all the sad cases, newly sober, shaky, during the holidays,
fraught with bad memories of family break-ups, one's life as a dog,
would 13th Step each other, drinking non-alcoholic punch
and dancing the dirty boogie, then a slow-dance. A lot of
cigarettes and coffee, a lot of refined sugar.
Commercials and old movies. Romance.
Any bonds, today? Support our boys overseas.
Ration stamps and bootleg gin.
No, that was Prohibition.
My Readership
I had several readers
who lived in the bushes
behind Eagle Army-Navy
Discount Department Store,
and one who lived in the back seat
of a car parked at City Park and bathed
in the public rest room. I'd see them on my way
to the post office, or the beach, on my walk,
or out riding my ten-speed bike, Straight Ahead,
on my errands. I carried a canvas tote-bag
for groceries. Condemned meat and reduced-price produce
from Publix and Neal's Farm Market. Owen brought home
fish he caught in the surf. Barracuda, mostly.
A small one will not give you ciguatera poisoning.
Oh yea, I had several readers at Delray Seafoods.
One girl wore a T-shirt that said, "Helmet Laws Suck."
My coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult.
Drying-out farms, mental hospitals, barracks,
oil platforms, a man who lived in a cardboard box
beneath a highway overpass, with a dog, and a checking account,
he wrote me a check and it was good, just because he was homeless
didn't make him a deadbeat, Eric Hoffer checked out library books
when he was hopping freights, and working as a migrant laborer,
and he returned them, back then the honor system meant something.
I Hate Christmas Less
I hate Christmas less
with every year. First,
there were children, and now,
I am a grandpa. My father's dead.
I think of him at Thanksgiving, Christmas,
and New Year's Day. The bowl games
on the television. College rivalries. The SEC.
Food, the exchange of gifts. He didn't drink.
There are continuities, down through the generations.
A longitudinal dimension, like Trollope's chronicles.
People do what they do. And then they're gone,
and it's just you. As Duke says, "Someone's always leaving,
someone's always being left behind." Some things go unsaid.
Better say them when you can. You might not
get the chance again.
A Rolling Stone
Once, Owen wanted to cook duck, for Christmas.
You know, in addition to a venison roast and a Boston butt.
I bought a couple, fresh, at Harry's Farmers' Market, in Atlanta.
He and Jean were living in Athens. He must have cooked
a leg of lamb, too, because I remember a mint sauce
made from a plant his mother gave him, tupelo honey,
bacon fat, from a coffee can on the back of a gas range
in their small apartment. They were newlyweds.
A washer-drier combination would fit in a utility closet.
A married couple, starting out. We had more shit
than would fit in a seabag, even though I culled things out
every PCS (permanent change of station). A rolling stone
gathers no moss, and neither does a professional musician.
Happy Holidays
Is this Prohibition,
is it the Great Depression,
World War II, Korea, Vietnam,
Gulf War Syndrome, Operation Dalkon Shield,
Bush I, Bush II, the Old Rollback,
the elimination of the capital gains tax,
the estate tax, a tax cut for the rich, tax shelters
for corporations, Star Wars for defense contractors,
no more environmental laws or irksome workplace safety
regulations, no oversight, fiduciary responsibility, honest audits,
good-faith bargaining, no checks and balances, pack the judiciary
with right-wing ideologues, pack Congress so the legislative branch
will go along, wreaths and holly, tinkling bells, jolly merchants, Jesus sells.
They have no bread, let them eat cake. The poor are as free to sleep under bridges
as the rich.
In Character
My Santa gig went okay.
The kids were neat. Very serious.
I asked one boy what he wanted, and he said,
“World peace, and for my parents to be happy.”
I was in character. I said, “You wouldn’t blow smoke
up Santa’s ass—would you, son?” He tried to kick me
in the nuts, like a midget.
From A LEGEND OF THE UNDERGROND
Dynamo
Charlie Parker said he was tired
of playing in cellars. I guess he wanted
a string section behind him, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,
composition lessons from Edgar Varèse, but he did
his best work in places that smelled of cigarette smoke
and stale beer, with a rhythm section behind him
and another horn, who pushed him, and whom he fed off of,
like Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, or Red Rodney, improvising,
on the fly. Swapping fours. I’d like to win a genius grant
and write the Great American Novel, properly, with time for
research, revision, polishing. Instead, I effloresce, I radiate
feuilletons, which I concatenate, in order of composition,
into a congeries of disparate elements looking for
some principle of organization. Let the reader
put them together in his head,
like the eye does with color, shapes,
and the ear does with interval, and sound.
Suspension of Disbelief
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Brew was Santa at his company Christmas party.
One co-worker got shitfaced, and confided
she had a thing about Santa’s outfit. Red with white trim.
She took all her clothes off, like a figure model, or Madonna,
the famous author of children’s books, on Oprah Winfrey,
pulling at her bodice so her bare midriff was not exposed
to television viewers. “Hey,” Brew’s co-worker asked,