Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404

Copyright © 2006 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.

To marketplace censorship.

I saw the best minds of my generation,
hankering, gross, mystical, nude,
their dicks knocked in the dirt by careerists,
saw Melville's nutmeg grater worn down by
the constant attrition of the wood, that is,
the nutmeg, to mix a metaphor. Is that
metaphoric or metonymic? Up the xylem,
down the phloem. The ischial callosity
of a mandrill during oestrus is a Matisse,
pomegranate blue. Cantharides, when applied
externally, are epispastic and rubifacient.
The useless knowledge of the autodidact.
I saw Allen Ginsberg turned into a totem,
the poster boy for the counterculture.
Only one allowed per generation.
Better him than me. I emerged at this end
lean and hungry, still, the fat burned away,
nothing left but muscle and bone and gristle,
and the gristle going fast. Arthritic, fat,
from lack of exercise, an unhealthy fat, I look
like Harry Crews, long in the tooth, old, seedy
and stove-up, I contradict myself, very well, then,
I contradict myself. I sound my barbaric yawp.
I go out not with a whimper, but a bang.
I propel myself forward by my own petard.
I expel gas. I eructate. I shit, I puke, I bleed.
I eat my own earwax and secrete toe-jam,
smegma, eye-matter, snot. The Art "Home" Brew,
compare art brut, Spent-Effluent Collection.
Like the Maya Angelou Life Mosaic Collection,
of inspirational greeting cards and positive messages.

This just in. Sunday night. Just back from arts festival.
Did not break even. Did not make money. Sold two books,
one to the other author, who shared a table with me. That is,
sold one to a pedestrian. Motel, rental car, supper at Gambino's,
on the bay. A seafood casserole and a seafood platter. For dessert,
a tiramisu and a bread pudding, to go. We ate the tiramisu in the motel room
that night and the bread pudding the next morning for breakfast. I'm typing up
what I wrote in a notebook, in longhand, then we're going to watch The Sopranos
on HBO. Tonight I cooked chicken thighs marinated in mojo criollo on the charcoal grill
and Brenda roasted potato slices in the toaster oven and sautéed zucchini and yellow squash
in olive oil and butter with oregano. In a skillet on top of the stove.
Sales were down owing to the Bush II recession. People go to street fairs and look.
They don't buy. Their discretionary income isn't what it was even last year.
If the economy is improving I'm a ring-tailed bassariscus, or cacomistle.
I fiddle while Rome burns. Like the president. Empty promises and reruns.
Agenbite of inwit. An age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
A consumerist society without consumers.

You can't have a consumerist society
without consumers. John Maynard Keynes
showed that in his General Theory of Money.
In the long run, we are dead. In the short run,
to have winners there must be losers. It's not
my job to, it didn't happen on my watch. I--.
John Goodman ran down the burning hall, shouting,
"Gaze upon me. I'll show you the life of the mind."
You don't listen, Barton. The cry of the fishmonger
is heard in the street.
The poster grown-up for Oprah Winfrey.
I fall out laughing. Where's Jewel?

The Underground Literary Alliance (ULA)
is holding a demonstration to protest
Allen Ginsberg's cooptation by the establishment.
As if someone could say, now, what he said
50 years ago, at the Six Gallery, in San Francisco.
Can you imagine what would happen to you if
you tried it? You'd be called a whiner. A crybaby.
Just another lady who protested too much. Someone with
a twisted, personal axe to grind. A malcontent. Go to
the chaplain and get your t. s. card punched. Tough shit.
Who are you a spokesperson for? What demographic group?
Yuppies? Young Republicans? The Fellowship of Christian Athletes?
Jews for Jesus? MFAs with tenure-track positions in universities?
Here, Julius--hold this. I just put my straight white male,
from the south, of a certain age, queer shoulder to the wheel.

Susan sent me two VCR tapes
with home movies transferred to them
of my extended family. Parents,
siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents,
nieces, nephews, cousins. Houses
we had lived in, when I was growing up.
Delray Beach. The charming little Village
by the Sea. Your deli man from Brooklyn
is now out west of town, in a shopping plaza
between planned communities, as seen on Seinfeld.
I don't know who planned what. Disaster preparedness.
Market forces. Supply and demand. Aging populations.
Tectonic shifts. War, famine, pestilence, real estate speculation.
Grandma Nordhem used to be the ticket-taker at the Delray Theater.
52¢ for adults, 14¢ for children. I got in free. Double feature Saturday afternoon,
with cartoon and serial. That's where daily typewriting came from. Enema vérité.
The paranoia-critical method. I write, I send it out, I write about what happens to it,
and how what happens makes me feel. What I do about how I feel. I write.

Arts and Crafts Festival on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay.
Fairhope, Alabama, where Fannie Flagg wrote Fried Green Tomatoes at
the Whistle-Stop Café. 54th annual. That's pretty venerable for
a tourist attraction. That's like the New Orleans Jazz Fest.
You have to be grandfathered in, or a hot new writing sensation,
the King of Daily Typewriting, Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut.
See him sign his book. Get your picture taken with him. Sign a release
and be included in the online press kit (OPK). Extra, extra, 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? His routine. A day in the life.
Dribs and drabs. The agony and the ecstasy. The down-time between
writing stints. At work in his studio. Everything else. Life. The transitions.
A white lab coat "for authenticity." He owns The Daily Bulletin, where he posts
the great long continuous saga-novel of his life, daily, as he writes it.
This just in. Just back from arts festival. Lost money. Grist for the mill.
Compare grind. Compare grits. Compare apples and oranges.