Tuesday, November 30 (cont'd)

I got in my car.
It started.
Scant comforts afforded by
the profession. A man
and his small, desktop computer
hate to be parted.

The field season I dug on the Aucilla River
we ate supper five nights a week at the Ship's Cove Café,
in Newport. Fried mullet, French fries, and iceberg lettuce
with bottled French dressing on it. My eyelids itched,
from Vitamin C deficiency. I didn't get tired of mullet, though.
A most excellent fish.

When Owen and I went to the opening
of a mail art show in Tallahassee,
and the Art Department apparatchiks
high-hatted me, and Owen, I left. Precipitously.
Before I threw the moneychangers out of the temple.
Frannie Mae, who co-curated the show, saw my name
in the guest register and called Brenda to say she was sorry
she missed us. "He's just weird," Brenda said. "Somebody
probably looked at him wrong." It was true. I am very
sensitive, and easily offended. Besides, it don't take me long
to look at a hand grenade, or a horseshoe.

For years, Black McGoon was my uncredited stunt double.
Once, he ended up like Evel Knievel at Caesar's Palace,
wrapped around the axle, when I totaled a 750cc Kawasaki
going into the local Dead Man's Curve accelerating.
Unless it was me. I packed dirt in my ear. The front wheel clicked
like the Foley artist making the sound of a bicycle crank
on the frame in Today I Am a Woman.
That day I was a man. Brenda warned me to retire,
and I did. Uxorious, as always. While I still could.
Undefeated. Bloody, but unbowed. Stove-up
but unrepentant.

One time in Port St. Joe, a merchant seaman from the Mondoro
we met in the St. Joe Bar took our razor-sharp machetes
out of the Army-surplus footlocker we used as a field box
and started juggling them, in a drunken saber dance.
"Stunta man," he said. "Numba one." Another merchant seaman
stole chief's jipijapa hat. Chief had to go to the pier, and have
the captain reclaim it for him. A cultural misunderstanding.
A night out of, or in, A Fellini movie.

I don't just write a poem now and then.
I'll go for months without writing any.
Then I'll write a pamphlet's worth,
at one fell swoop, go back to prose.
When the muse is on me, though,
there's nothing to be done but try
to get it down before it passes.
What Roland Kirk called the urgency.
It will kick your ass. Like a riceburner
up against a Harley-Davidson.

Shakespeare never blotted a line.
Same with Mozart. The music just flowed,
like he was taking dictation. The paintings van Gogh did
at the end of his life look sloppy, until you examine them
closely, with a painter's eye. A mistake is existential. Use it.
Ask a Zen master.

What does one say to Ginger Stanley?
How many sexual fantasies have I had
of you treading water in your white, Spandex bathing suit
and me beneath you in the inky depths, looking. Like a pervert.
Scaly and reptilian. Purple, twitching, hideous.
Papa, kill that awful dreadful snake.
Don't worry, son, it goes away, as you get older.
One day you'll be wearing gold chains and Rolex watches,
instead. Hors de combat from The Nookie Wars.
It isn't impotence so much as sublimation.
Many writers my age (64) talk a good fuck.
Ernest Hemingway blew his head off.
And he won the Big Casino.
Watch out for Black Dog,
as he called his clinical depression.

Q: Are you depressed?

A: I get a little down, from time to time. But I rally.

Q: What gets you down?

A: Not having any place to send something that I think is good, when I finish writing it. Not knowing how I will support myself while I write the next book.

How would you like to come down with a book like Blue Ball Blues, written in an afternoon?

Wouldn't it terrify you?

Q: It must be exhilarating, though.

A: Writing without publishing is like chewing without swallowing.

"Blue Ball Blues" is a song by Kyle Ogle.

"Putty Knife Blues" is a song by Ron Cliburn.

Mark Twain said, "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."

James Jones said, "Writing without publishing is like chewing without swallowing."