Seattle (cont'd)

Sue booked me on a flight on Tuesday
on Northwest Airlines to Seattle. One change
in Memphis. I checked the gym bag I received as a present
from a grateful company when I worked for Lucent Technologies
through and carried the backpack I bought at Wally World with copies of
my new book and two journals in it, one as the primary and one as the
relief, or spare. Into the air, Junior Birdman. My orange earplugs on their blue cord
complement my Navy blazer. My way of blocking out the passive conversation.

My backpack has a nametag on it
with a Greyhound logo. If you can't go first-class,
go low-rent. Into the air, Junior Birdman.
I don't have a cell phone. I won't leave my hand-carried baggage
unattended. I won't smoke in a nondesignated area.
For purposes of health or public safety. Or arbitrary fiat.
Homeland Security. Where is Bernie Kerik now that we need him?
He's at the cantina, playing bezique.

You can't get away from television.
It's beamed from TV sets on stanchions
like Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-four.
Mike Long used to tell about all the mental patients watching
The Snake Pit in the hospital dayroom. And once when I was walking back
from the A&P with a bag full of two tall six-packs of beer, from every tract house
came the blue glow of The Stepford Wives. Irony is cheap, comedy is hard.
My airline magazine had an article on modern art museums between the coasts.
Everything's up to date in Kansas City. Picture of one in Milwaukee that has a
moveable white sunscreen that looks like Jake Webb's gull-wing Mercedes,
or the upswept retro women's glasses my mother wore from 1958 to 1960.

I wish I'd brought
my father's ruptured duck,
to wear as a rosette in my blue blazer.
However, it is a decoration I did not earn,
not having served in World War II. I was in
the bad war, or non-war, the Cold War between
Korea and Vietnam. Before Gulf War I,
or the quagmire in Iraq. We were always on alert.
Our operational readiness was always being tested.
Once, I was shot at in a training accident, when a surface-to-air missile
went off by mistake, then self destructed over the active runway, and we
all thought it was the enemy. When you live in a world of engineered perceptions
and accelerated propaganda telling the difference between reality and bullshit is difficult.
Between a lightning bug and lightning. And now of course there are those flat-affect
looks the players of the video games present. Zombies ate my co-workers
and my supervisor.

I can remember when passengers came aboard
with tennis rackets. Then the barrel-shaped key
for the IBM PC AT. Now the latest Harry Potter novel.
I can remember when the seats were not so cramped,
when hot meals were served, cocktails, hell, I can remember
when you were allowed to smoke. And many did. Perhaps most.
But all through all of that I never saw a person writing poems
in a Big Chief tablet. Poetry will kill, or doom a book proposal.
Might as well try to sell The Enormous Room. It heads the list
of areas not interested in agenting. Poetry, literary fiction,
autobiographical anecdotes and ravings.

Me and another fat guy lucked out.
The seat between us was unoccupied,
and we had room to spread our fat legs out.
President Bush says to disassemble means
not to tell the truth. I needed that, Mr. President.
Merci Toujours. He is reading the latest Harry Potter novel
and I am writing poems in a Big Chief tablet. I must hate America
to insult our fearless leader, Clueless George. From the air the Memphis airport
looks about like the St. Louis airport, but I know there is a difference.
John Hartford was a Mississippi River pilot. I remember his expression when
Ralph Stanley sang, "Death, won't you spare me over for another year,"
on the concert video Down From the Mountain. He was dying of cancer.
Irony is cheap. Comedy is easy. Life is hard. And then it's over.

I realized, watching the kids at the zine fest,
that reading is in at least as good hands
as it was in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg read "Howl"
at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. I see a lot of parallels
between Bush and Nixon. The people in the environmental movement say
a victory is temporary, a defeat is permanent. It's the same with civil liberties.
And freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. Well, I own one.
Everything is the opposite of what it appears to be on television. And that's where
everybody gets his information. Except for my coterie of steadfast readers,
and people like them.

I remember flying home for my father's funeral.
I was sad because he'd never seen me sober.
Since I was 17, anyway. I drank alcoholically for 20 years,
then quit for 20 years. I'd been sober a year when he died.
I had a silver dollar with one hole drilled in it. Now I have
a Lewis-Clark-Drouillard lugwah (from la gloire)
minted by the Shawnee Indian Nation. I am alone in
my private glory, as Henry Miller said when he returned
from Europe and surveyed the scene. I paid $35 for my lugwah,
plus tax, plus shipping. I drank an Augsburger Golden Lager
on my flight home to my mother's funeral. My arm didn't
turn green and fall off. Although I wouldn't want to make
a habit of it.

Once when I went out to Seattle, I declined to buy
a used copy of The Quality of Hurt, by Chester Himes,
and wished I had, as soon as I got home. I would call my autobiography
Don't Take It Personal. Or What's It To You--Are You Writing a Book?
No one cares about your unpublished play, Mr. Lowry.
Talent unrewarded is the most leprous hotdog in the pot,
Bukowski says.