Tallahassee

Tallahassee is a nice place to live
if you're a student, or a newlywed.
Or even if you are a college-town hanger-on,
if you have a permanent, Career Service job
with the state. But not if you're blacklisted
for filing a grievance after the old rollback got you,
cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Not if you've been snubbed by the writers' clique
associated with the university. Who do you think
you are? The Apalachee Quarterly wrote,
"We take great pleasure in rejecting his work."
They did accept a poem, that went,

Potter tells about
walking out on deck
in his shorts. It is dawn.
He went to cut a fart
and shit a brown stream down his leg,
like a seagull.
"This is the life," he thought.

Never trust a red roe fart.

The sinkhole lakes, the wild rivers,
an hour's drive away, the coast.
The seafood restaurants. The Oaks,
Harry's Georgian, Julia Mae's.
Places you have dug, or worked,
or applied for a job, or been let go.
People you had to ask for a reference,
hat in hand. In the Last Days, you find
you waited too late to pray.
The man of hubris is punished,
not by the gods, but by rabbits,
sheep, state workers, in polyester
travel suits and leatherette briefcases
and Hushpuppy shoes. How dare you
have the temerity to ask an impertinent question.
Try this. Get fired, evicted, and arrested for
drunk driving. Have to move with no job,
no income, no money. I hit the trifecta.
If Paris was a moveable feast Tallahassee
was a stationary famine. At least, stale bread
and ditch weeds. I graduated magna cum laude.
I made Phi Beta Kappa. I was an Outstanding Senior.
Past glory. You fucked up. You're going to have to move
to Delray Beach and move in with your recently widowed mother,
Swiss Family Boomerang Family, and take a job in the bank
your father was on the board of directors of. This is
a success story. I hit bottom. I quit drinking.
I turned my life around. I could write a book
called Drinking. Growing Up. The Writing Life.
Ha ha. Evil Genius. Open Book. Forty.
I'm 65. I have everything I need.
I'm driving to Tallahassee in
the family car, writing poems in
a composition book.
The corporate cubicle culture.
A picture of a cat hanging from
a clothesline, with the caption,
"Hang in there, baby."
People surfing the Internet.
Their lives a vast wasteland of busywork
and ass-kissing. I made it through all that
with my integrity intact. I only myself alone
am escaped to tell.

Bartleby the Scrivener said
he'd prefer not to. He ended up
in the Dead Letter Office, winging his way
by winged messenger, like a rejection slip
on winged feet. Hermes (Mercury),
the god of commerce, thieves, and
the medial profession. This happened to me
at the same time I was fired, evicted, and arrested
for drunk driving. When a man's down, kick him.
Nobody told him to go down. My manuscript,
which had been misplaced, was located and returned to me
unread. I had thought them keeping it nine months was
a good sign, and called to inquire about its status.
A skunk doesn't squirt you out of malice.
If you overtighten an o-ring it will
squush out. That's not the o-ring's fault.
Finesse is called for. Timing.
Can't be too heavy-handed.

I was a writer-in-residence
in the research lab, with an office
and an electric typewriter, a library card
as an adjunct, or courtesy professor,
a copying machine, no small, desktop computer,
no worldwide web yet, but we were past carbon paper
and Thermofax machines. I was writing a report comparing
civil war prisons, north and south, based on the diaries of
survivors. And now I'm writing such an account myself.
I am the man, I suffered, I was there, Walt Whitman said,
in Specimen Days. It wasn't so bad. It could have been worse.

The last time I was in Tallahassee was for a small press conference.
It was boll weevils from university writing departments trying to figure out
how to hog all the grant money for themselves and exclude outsiders.
Let's all network. Who was I? The poor boy at the party. My shoes
were garbage. All those old feelings came back in a flash.
My inferiority complex. My festering resentment.
My involutional melancholia. Round up the usual suspects.
From Here To Eternity begins with Robert E. Lee Prewitt
leaving the bugle company for a line infantry outfit.
Red could stay, because Red was not a bugler.
But Prewitt had to leave, because he wanted
most of all to stay.