Redacted Poems

Trollope wrote that his imaginary Barsetshire was as real to him as any place in England, and that he was loath to leave it, but that that story was now done.

Patrick O'Brian, rest in peace

David Mamet, "The Humble Genre Novel, Sometimes Full of Genius," "Writers On Writing," New York Times, January 17, 2000.

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

Copyright © 2003, 2004 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.

Bill Roberts
Bottle of Smoke Press

Recently I got a job, after being out of work for 18 months.

I had ten weeks separation pay from being laid off, went on reduced benefit social security, and had 26 weeks of unemployment, plus one 13-week extension, so I made it a year, just fine, but the last six months were kind of nervous, and I ran a bank credit card balance up, while looking for a job.

I wrote up a storm, needless to say. With the threat of having to go back to work hanging over me.

I wrote 32 books in 18 months, and posted the books online, as I wrote them, at my web page, roman-feuilleton.com. Some of the feuilletons were poems.

When I went back to work, I took down roman-feuilleton.com and started a new web page, The Daily Bulletin (www.thedailybulletin.com). I started redacting the book I put up on the web, and part of what I took out was poems.

I found myself writing a book in three parts. DIRECTOR'S CUT: AMERICAN LETTERS' SMOKING GUN. The version on the Internet is bowdlerized, in the interest of me keeping my day job. DIRECTOR'S CUT is the unexpurgated version, the book, with the redacted cuts restored. The book runs 100,000 words.

It strikes me that the poems from DIRECTOR'S CUT might make a chapbook.

I would call it Redacted Poems, by analogy with Collected Poems, or Selected Poems.

I called a book REJECTED POEMS, once.

I looked up Ann Menebroker in Google and got a hit on Bottle of Smoke Press.

Are you interested in publishing Redacted Poems?

Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.