On the Road Again (cont'd)

The Negro Fort, sailors on a gunship
dropped a red-hot cannonball
on the powder magazine. Killed
fugitive slaves and Indians resisting
removal. Squaws and pickaninnies,
mostly. Bucks, braves. Polliwogs.
Selected out, by superior union forces.
Did you think they would forget
such an insult to the body politic?
The clan, the tribe, the race?
Does the expression blood feud
ring a bell? No, this isn't Bosnia,
Palestine, or Northern Ireland.
It's good old America, U. S. A.
A nation without a memory.

The Bloxham Cutoff, Highway 267,
goes straight to Wakulla Springs, and Newport,
through the Apalachicola National Forest.
A lot of trees. Jacon's Dog Pen Road. Tupelo
Honey. Stump Grinding. Apalachicola is more
than a river where you can still catch sturgeon.
It's a drainage basin of great ecological diversity
and wildness. Not to mention The Last Great Bay.
If Thoreau owned the land he built his cabin on
at Walden Pond, he'd have been priced out of it
by property taxes, a luxury condominium apartment
building on either side of him, perhaps a theme park
called Thoreau World, offering back-to-nature retreats
and intensive diary-writing workshops. Solitude, privacy,
your own unpeopled void. Kosher meals slightly extra.

The college radio station is playing Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries."
I think of Col. David Hackworth, recently deceased, some say from a cancer
caused by Agent Blue. A mustang officer, elevated from the enlisted ranks.
The model for the soldier played by Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now.
I love the smell of napalm in the morning. The brass boycotted his funeral.
He expected no less. A tribute to his lifelong contumacy. Nixon watching Patton,
drunk, the ultimate jocksniffer, registering 3.8 on the Goodrich scale.
Drunker than four barrels of dog shit.

Wagner taught himself to write grand opera by studying the scores
of Fidelio and Don Giovanni. Then practicing. Staging presentations.
Ended up with a permanent venue, Bayreuth, to perform his Ring Cycle
every year, to which music lovers from around the world go.
I'd like to see my stack published in an oeuvre complète.
A variorum edition, with footnotes. A goat wants horns,
but he dies buttheaded. You have to be strong in your mind,
Monk said.

The last time I was at
Wakulla Springs State Park
was for Creaturefest 2003.
Could that be? Has it been
that long since I drove to Panacea,
as Brenda calls my little side trips.
I wrote a pamphlet of poems
I called Blue Ball Blues, after a song
Dread Clampitt sings, which Kyle Ogle wrote.
Writing without publishing is like chewing without swallowing.

It used to be I could identify any piece of classical music
I ever heard, or jazz, or blues, or bluegrass, folk music,
probably not rock and roll or pipi-tease disco, but now
it all runs together in my head, so that if I repeat myself,
or get my stories wrong, I'm just being true to my condition,
which I diagnose as involutional melancholia. Comes on with
old age. Often accompanied by paranoia. Someone is out to get me.
I don't know who, I can't imagine why. All I know is they are out there.
It's got me depressed, and pessimistic about my chances of becoming
all the man I hoped to be, when I still had my reflexes and my energy.

I think I once took a leak

in the public restroom of the lodge at Wakulla Springs, and stood next to Ed Ball,
of the St. Joe Paper Company. It used to be the pork chop legislators would look up
in the balcony before they voted, to see if his man had his thumb up, or down, but now
the lobbyists write the legislation for them. It's a done deal by the time it hits
the floor. No surprises. It's theater. It's choreographed. A Kabuki play.
I think I saw his reptilian old member snaked out like a sword, or a diamondback
rattlesnake. Grandfather, Chief. Good thing I was clad in the breastplate
of righteousness, and stood, and in the evil day, withstood.