Crawfordville

The Wakulla County courthouse
had a clock that didn't run.
It was right twice a day,
as the old times who sat
outside the hardware store
next door would say.
Bill Gwynn wrote a book of poems
with a picture of them on the cover
he called Loafer's Bench.

The offices of the Wakulla News
are in Crawfordville, the county seat.
They depend on legal notices, subscriptions,
newsstand sales, and Piggly Wiggly sale ads
to support their investigative reporting of
the real estate development industry.
In the pines, in the pines,
where the sun never shines.

Tattered Pages Books and Espresso Bar
is Crawfordville's, perhaps Wakulla County's
premier bookstore and coffeehouse. When I took
the $15 CD Dread Clampitt and the $5 liner notes Root Doctor by,
the owner said, "Gee, we don't sell music." I should have pitched them as
a $20 booklet with a free CD included. She was pissed at me
for making fun of her by showing the actual book cover of
Jack Rudloe's book, Pot Luck, next to the bowdlerized version
she put in her ad for his book signing, that made the marijuana leaf
look like the pinchers of the man-ant creature in the movie Mant
reaching out to pinch Cathy Moriarty's ass in the movie Matinee.

Book Signing Jack Rudloe Tattered Pages Books

When I listen to Performance Today
on NPR I think of Joan Rivers on the red carpet,
saying, "You're so beautiful, you career's so hot."
She looks like a raptorial bird. A flesh-eater.
Something R. Crumb might draw. I'm a has-been.
An also-ran. A never-was. Think of Dodo Marmarosa,
living with his folks in Philadelphia. Keeping his chops up
by practicing. Playing by himself. After the vigilante sailors
called him a zoot-suiter, going home from a gig with Gene Krupa's band,
and stove his head in.