critiquing (sic) just isn't for breakfast anymore

I’m pleased to see Jim Stone has joined the paper’s community blogging corps. Jim’s addition offsets the sadness of losing Ms. Fuller. It appears her busy social life left little time to blog about her busy social life. I’ll always picture Miss C tripping the light fantastic with stubbly soap star or neck kissing 54th Street Romeos while an antique disco ball’s rotating tin bathes Conga Bob’s Bungalow in Baroque bling. Her adventurous appetite for urban sparkle reminded me of my brief fling with big city hustle.

Alas, NYC ate my liver and left me with barely enough coin to cage a slow Greyhound ride home. On the upside, I was the only Carterville poet sporting pointy black boots and skinny yellow tie when unceremoniously de-bussed near the coffin factory. Had not my rival returned from Rangoon in flashy opium den finery, I might have become The Stagger Inn’s in-house Dylan Thomas: denied immortalizing early morning stabs at bad sex in slippery villanelles remains this fading Uranthian's eighth greatest regret.

Once the gals took one look at Jock Lovelace’s embroidered silk dragon jacket, I was toast. Defeated, I limped across Chat Mountain and licked my bloody muse inside a jumpy stripper’s single-wide. To make a long story short, Karla quickly tired of my temperamental languor. Although our parting wasn’t sweet sorrow, it did attract the attention of local law enforcement.

Anson will have to step up his game now that Jim has “joined the fray.” The unlikely editorial writer’s meat cleaver is no match for his scalpel; retreating to the fetid swamp of false equivalence when caught speaking-from-ass ensures a short-lived career. Kicking hippies sticking flowers into gun barrels is like forty years ago, man. The late, great Porter Wittich laid some advice on me that I took to heart.

“Write about stuff you know,” he said. “Or at least have some vague approximation.”

And for the next twenty years I wrote about poverty.

Anson would be better served limiting his public verse to underwater oddities and/or the feminine mystique.

Well, I must feed my “old man pooch.” Damn it, sometimes Johnny Kaje’s barbs sting. I guess I’ll go back to showering in the dark.