No End
“But we did [make it]. We have [made it]. This is it [making it].”
Mike McKinney, Lucky Mud
Write more poems like “Driving Through Tyndall.”
A reader
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Copyright © 2010 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.
I ended SCRIB ONLINE: IN THE HANDS OF A CAPABLE ARTISAN, “Is he crazy?”
The book attempts to answer that question.
Could I tell if I was if I wasn’t?
Could I tell if I was if I was?
It’s Friday, but the day doesn’t mean anything when they all run together.
I get up thinking about the writing. I write. I send it out.
I hear back nothing, or a form letter rejection slip.
I pay the bills. I worry about money. I look for a job.
My heart’s not in it. I am a discouraged worker.
I try to think of something to write that I can sell.
I can’t think of anything.
I like to read books like I write.
I guess I’ll keep doing that. Other people like them. My coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult.
Why would it end? It isn’t over.
I went on a trip and my sleep rhythm is out of whack.
Luckily, it doesn’t matter when I sleep and when I am awake.
If I am awake, I think about the writing.
Probably when I am asleep, too.
But I don’t know that.
I think I’ll take a nap.
It’s
I woke up last
night coughing and wrote for two hours, from
The music is better on the radio then.
I’m going to rest now.
I’m not in a hurry to do anything.
What would I do?
Write.
Woodie Long died last year.
Jimmy Barfield died.
I went to Potterfest, to celebrate Uncle Potter. Then I went to see my brother Bill, who was dying.
Bill died.
Bill didn’t know Potter died.
When my sister Susan told him, Bill cried. Bill loved Potter.
I loved Bill.
I loved Potter too.
For that matter, I loved Woodie Long. I loved Barfield.
If I died, people would miss me. People love me.
I am getting tired. Weary. Wearing the same shabby dress.
I don’t feel like I fulfilled my potential.
I don’t feel like, now, I am going to.
Whatever I did, that was it. If it wasn’t good enough, tough shit.
That’s all I had. It wasn’t enough.
I’m going on inertia. Habit.
It’s what I do.
It’s all I know.
I did it for 38½ years.
You don’t stop doing something like that.
You continue.
From where you left off.
It’s a serial. There’s always another episode.
The cast is in place. Champing at the bit. Chewing up the scenery. The sets.
The setting. The theme. Vocation and career in conflict.
Don’t cry for me,
Cry for Bush.
He fucked up like a T-6 in the NCO Club.
Dodo Marmarosa
couldn’t leave
Don’t cry for Dodo Marmarosa.
Cry for Buddy DeFranco. A life in the Golden Age of Jazz.
I wrote in an age of marketplace censorship.
Not to make excuses.
Nobody wants to hear about your unpublished play.
Suck it up. Cole Porter belonged to the French Foreign Legion.
School, military service, work.
Retirement.