Black Papers: Poems

Irascible "Razz" Heap, compare Incredible Hulk,
was a senior fellow at the prestigious left-wing think-tank
in Point and Shoot, Florida, the Point and Shoot
Institute (PSI). He wrote white papers on a variety
of topics. Current events, local politics. Arts and letters.
He posted what he wrote online, daily, at his web site
on the worldwide web, The Daily Bulletin (www.thedaily
bulletin.com). He replied to reader comments in the books.
His books were thus both written (and published)
in real time and interactive, in that he thought about
the feedback that he got from his coterie of steadfast readers,
the Buzzard Cult.

Heap was trained as a dirt archeologist.
He took his name from Shell Heap Archaic,
an archeological period. Before pottery.
Before agriculture. The Buzzard Cult was
named after the Southeastern Ceremonial
Complex, a revitalization movement that swept
the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and after
European contact. He had a cult following but
it wasn't a very big one. High one-, low-two figures.
It's no insuperable burden to pay the reader to read your work.

Heap was his own paparazzo.
He carried a digital point-and-shoot camera
in a fanny pack. One time Kurt Schwitters
pasted a banknote that said Kommerzbank on a collage,
pasted other screeds over it, and ended up with merz.
That's what he called what he was doing. Merz.
Heap pasted paparazzo on a collage, pasted other screeds
over it, and ended up with razz. That's what he called what
he was doing. Razz. All that razz. Razz was a verb, too.
"Razz Me Blues." Heap razzed, or cocked a snook at, New York.
"We're No. 1." "New York is a city run entirely by lists."
"Not right for our list." What made them black papers was
you didn't bite the hand that fed you. You don't sass the people
you hope to work for. Don't talk back. It would be like
Upton Sinclair writing The Jungle and having to show it to
the meatpackers. Heap called himself a vernacular writer.
Vernacular means of native-born slaves. A slave is
an ambassador in bonds, who speaks boldly, as one
ought to speak. To his master.
Here, Julius-hold this.

You don't bite the hand that feeds you.
Heap was feuding with what he called
War Heads-the loose confederacy of
publishing professionals in the book industry.
Publishers, book reviewers in the media of mass
communication, arts bureaucrats in arts agencies
and cultural foundations, and writing instructors
and literary critics in university Creative Writing programs
and English departments. Think of Herblock drawing
Richard Nixon crawling out of a sewer covered with slime
and rat shit. Toilet paper, sanitary napkins, and used condoms.
Heap told New York to go piss up a rope. He told them to
shit in their hat. He wore a gimme cap from B & B Feed & Seed
in Wewahitchka, Florida, with an anatomically-correct boar hog
on the front. Root, hog, or die. Heap was a Northwest Florida
rooter and a snorter. He charged over the edge of the cliff
like the Gadarene swine on a suicide mission.
He rammed the Pequod with his big, ugly,
white-whale head and sank it.
In the neighborhoods, Lightning
was fierce. Lightning Hopkins.
Heap has a limited audience.
He knows many of his readers
by name, or by email address.
He used to hear from them
when he was still online.
Heap is a Northwest Florida Proust.
Do you know anybody else who is doing
what he's doing? Has done it as well, for as long?
Don't cry for me, Argentina. The nouveau roman
is not about emotions. It's about action. What
a person did and what happened to it. In the meat world.
Claude Lévi-Strauss subtitled The Savage Mind
The Science of the Concrete. If Tristes Tropiques had been
a novel, instead of a memoir, it would have won the Prix Goncourt.

When I read a line like, "They denied me a life,"
it makes me cry. In the 1990s, Philip Roth won
the New York Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/
Faulkner Award, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize,
and the National Medal of Arts at the White House. This makes
me jealous. I have fear, anger, and resentment. I get up, the writing
roaring in my head, and have to shut it off, to go to work. It's frustrating.
I lose stuff. This makes me sad. Profoundly depressed.
Confused and disoriented. A vein
throbs in my head. I expect to explode,
like Zero Zilenski's kingfish, or a ripe papaya
at Waite's Bird Farm. Clowns creep me out.
Rust Hills called me an injustice-collector.
Tooling down to the keys with his wife,
Joy Williams, in a classic Mustang.
I feel like Ed Harris in The Human Stain.

Cacoëthes Scribendi had a restless urge to write.
The more you empty out, the more you fill back up,
Whitman said. In Network, Ned Beatty told Peter Finch
he was messing with primal forces. Ebbs and flows.
Tidal cycles. In "Centaur in Brass," William Faulkner
called the water tower in Jefferson, Mississippi,
"a footprint." That's the way I felt about the water tower
in Sandestin, and this was before Silver Sands Outlet Mall,
Seaside, Highway 30A, and The Beaches of South Walton County.
It was just a golf course, a marina, and shop-pays, as Manfred called them.
Shoppés of Florida's Great Northwest, Incorporated. The rising gorge.
What if you have no outlet for it? What if it doesn't go anywhere?
Doesn't complete the cycle? It cankers. You get crabby and hung-up
about rejection. On the other hand, to a certain kind of personality,
this may act as a stimulus, a goad. It may egg him on.
Adversity is the jewel in the head of the toad.
What jobs did I work at, what places did I live?
How did I hold body and soul together.
Be true to my responsibilities to others
and still be faithful to my own finer qualities.
Life is a tradeoff and a crapshoot.
You don't choose writing, it chooses you.
Ha ha, or it doesn't. What then, Camerado?
When lilacs last in the courtyard bloomed.

My work habits as a writer are an extension of
my study habits in college. I made Phi Beta Kappa.
With an IQ of 104. That is, I earned it. I worked.
My study habits came from the work-ethic I learned
being an enlisted man in the service. And that came from
enlisting--there was a draft--and serving honorably.
I got that from high school civics classes and the coaches who
would give a pint of ice cream to the first man to draw blood
in football practice. If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well.
If you start a job, finish it. See it through. My parents were children of
the Great Depression and my grandparents barely survived the Depression,
World War I, and the flu epidemic. My parents survived World War II
and polio. I survived Haight-Ashbury. Godless hippies my co-religionists.
Hunter S. Thompson could point to where the water crested, and began to recede.
You're too big to go down the drain, Mr. Rogers says. But I feel like
I am circling it. I feel its tug. Subterranean forces.
Dope addiction and sexually-transmitted diseases.
In Apocalypse Now, when the tiger jumps out of the bushes
at Chef, he says, "I didn't make it out of the 8th grade for this."
I did, though. I made it to the Bush-Enron administration.
I got to see George W. Bush and his henchmen in action.
Talk about a Roman circus.

In 2009, after my extended unemployment benefits (EUB)
were exhausted, I got a job writing training courses for
the unemployed. It was economic stimulus-package trickle-down
money. Some of it trickled down to me. I had used my year
on unemployment to write the great American novel, or
yoob novel, as I called it. A play on EUB and yob, or yobbo.
A soccer hooligan. A blue-collar worker. A redneck. I called
the genre I was working in hick lit, a play on chick lit.
I called chick lit chick lite. Not a calorie in a carload.
A writer can work in advertising and public relations,
he can be a journalist, and write for the newspapers
and slick magazines, he can write for television and
the movies. It used to be, Nelson Algren said, if you
went Hollywood you had sold out, but now, if you write
what New York wants you have sold out. New York
is Hollywood. New York is Hollywood, books are television,
the writer is a rock star, or a movie star. The bookstore in the mall
is the Gap and the Internet is the bookstore in the mall. 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 an epidemic of soft-tissue cancers
and simian immunovirus (SIV). You pays your money and you makes
your choice. Syphilis or yaws. I worked as a technical writer.
I wrote THE LAST BEATNIK. A LIFE OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM.
I told New York to go piss up a rope. I hockeyed in my own nest.
THE LAST BEATNIK is a black memoir, I guess.
Last Beatnik Found Dead in Point and Shoot.
Like the Jap in a cave on Guam who didn't know
the war was over and his side lost. Still fighting.
Still stinging himself in the head, like a scorpion.
Still scuffling after all these years.
Still hanging in there like
a hair on a biscuit.