A Literary Journal of Critical Thinking
In the Samizdat Tradition of Writing against the Machine
A Forum for Examining the Dark Side of the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex

Jon Gregory (Fort Worth, Texas) 
Exit Only, An Online Literary Journal and Poetry Chapbook (www.exitonlypoems.blogspot.com) is Jon Gregory's website.  "I am from the small-town working class, and found that formal education is almost the only ticket out of that scene. With help from the welfare state, I suffered academia as far as a master's degree, and even considered college teaching until sanity prevailed. The politics and cronyism would have made tenure impossible.  So I went into newspaper journalism.  At 50, I'm a veteran copy editor for a metro daily, and an occasionally published poet/writer. I think the problem with contemporary poetry is too much academic navel-gazing. I'm sick of bland, arcane mindscapes and angst-oozing confessions. The MF As live in quaking fear of making a direct statement or telling a simple story. At the other extreme are shock-jock slammers who dumb it down so as to rate a "10" from barflies. The real stuff, I believe, is in between; and it's a lonely place."

Elvis Was a Redneck Cracker
Who Couldn’t Write a Song
They say they found his body
In a bathroom, bloated and shit-smeared.
Fell off the commode with a coronary
While reading some kind of sacred text.
I think he might be in heaven now,
But I'd bet a rock star's drug budget
That his house don't look like Graceland.
Twenty years after they found his obese corpse,
The faithful flooded Memphis
For the biggest velvet-painting convention in human history.
A reporter asked a man on the street
What he thought about the shindig.
He said, "I think it's all very nice,
But I prefer to worship God."
 

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