Readers Digest

Readers Digest

The Great American Bathroom Book, II:

How come I never heard of number one?

Just who among the literati knew

Reading the classics could be such fun?

They weren't published in the capital of hype—

No, not in New York, but Salt Lake City!

626 pages of five-point type,

Which, in terms of bite size, is itty-bitty.

“Single-Sitting Summaries of Great Books,”

Classics, from the dawn of civilization on,

Heavy fare the average Mormon overlooks,

Now digested for him for the john—

Classics he can read in just one sitting:

The Catch 22 is he must be shitting.

                            Robert Forrey, 2011

Lascivious Carriage

Lascivious Carriage

The woman of lascivious carriage

Is related to everyone in town,

Either by blood or marriage:

Every long face, every clown;

Every doctor, lawyer, and chief,

Every teetotaler, every drunk;

Every policeman, every thief,

Every nice kid, every punk:

Every depressive and manic,

Every ex-husband (all cousins)—

Her hairdresser, mailman, and mechanic—  

She’s related to millions, not dozens.

Considering how many have lived and died,

 We shouldn’t prejudge or disparage;

Considering how steep and long the ride,

We’d never have made it without her carriage.

                             Robert Forrey, 2011

Games

Clueless (2007), Robert Forrey

Games

They were different from the beginning

And if only he had seen in what ways

And not been preoccupied with winning

But rather had cleverly played it as it lays,

It would have been a less frustrating game,

One played with many fulsome round objects,

In which there’s no place for race, grief, or shame

Defiled under the rubric pet projects.

But that’s always the way with perfection,

Which is not what it’s cracked up to be—

Bootlegged hankering after rejection

Is what it is, to speak dishonestly.

Aren’t we always playing games at the shrine

Not of what’s mine, really, but of what’s thine?

                                      Robert Forrey, 2011

Church in a Holler

Church in a Holler

He kept an album of “holler” churches,

A photo record, a disbeliever’s portfolio—

Places of worship among pines and birches—

Each time he thought it was complete, bingo!

 He would find yet another one, hidden

In some unfamiliar holler,

As though the many miles he had driven

Were just a drop in the bucket, smaller

Than the  eye of an agnostic newt,

Smaller than the smallest molecule,

Smaller than any doctrine he could refute,

Smaller even than Voltaire’s ridicule.

 Always another day, another dollar,

Always another church in a holler.

                           Robert Forrey, 2011

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

Addicted to truth, booze and cigarettes,

He was both obnoxious and brilliant.

Despising both steeples and minarets—

He was God’s most atheist militant. 

“Faith is the surrender of the mind,”

He wrote, “the surrender of reason.”

The faithful were not only blind

And dumb but a social lesion— 

A lump in the breast of human kindness,

A persistence of a primal madness,

A recessive gene for blindness,

 A Johnnie Appleseed of badness. 

Religion’s not for the blessed, the chosen—

Beneath all the folderol, it’s poison.

                               Robert Forrey, 2011 

Rebel Without a Clause

Rebel Without a Clause

He had teaching not only on the brain,

But in every corpuscle and platelet.

Teaching English to the Appalachian—

Something he hadn’t larned to hate yet—

Was tol’rabble, really, not all that hard.

But as mangled part’ciples ‘cum’lated

Like young ‘uns and wrecks in the front yard,

As his brain became as confed’rate-plated

As poor Guv’nor Wallace standing in the door

To bar each blackguard Yankee intonation,

He knew he’d become one of ‘em, to the core.

Born agin to The Birth of a Nation,

He retired to that unspeakable hell

Where orn‘rary folk don’t talk good or spell well.

                      Robert Forrey, 2011

Careering

Careering

On his birth certificate, it said

His father’s occupation was “boatman,”

But bootlegger’s what it should have read,

Including his ninety days in the can.

One brother was a sailor, one a stevedore,

One a house painter—“asshole of the trades,”

As it was known—a patron of whores,

Seducer of immigrant hotel maids.

He didn’t know what he would  like to do for

A living but, in high school, in a bind,

Told a career counselor “astronomer,”

As though the universe was on his mind:

Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight,

I wish I’ll have the wish I wish tonight.

                                   Robert Forrey, 2011

Savoring the Stars

Savoring the Stars

As a child he could see some stars at night

Even though he lived in a big city.

Since then he’s been thankful for the slight light

They threw on the galaxy’s velocity

As it expanded towards infinity.

Though he couldn’t have named one by sight,

The constellations offered security

Like Linus’s blanket did from Lucy’s spite.

The stars relieved religion’s anxiety.

If they failed to make the crazy world all right,

At least they tempered the inanity

And fueled his imagination’s first flight.

Itty-bitty city boy: star light, star bright—

He savored the first star he saw at night.

                                           Robert Forrey, 2011

Fruit

Fruit

                                                            “A poem should be palpable and mute 

                                                             As a globed fruit . . .”

                                                                               Archibald MacLeish

It’s not Adam’s apple—

It’s Eve’s peach.

Meaning, like Snapple,

 Should be just out of reach.

                        Robert Forrey, 2011

Sunday Drivers

Sunday Drivers

Poor Max, he’d lost his way.

Ex-lover, ex-husband, Ex-Lax—

Showers of April, not flowers of May—

The minimum, not the max.

His losses were not negligible, 

He never made monetary gain.

His mistakes weren’t fungible,

He capitalized on pain.

What did she do for him? Not much.

He was one of them, not one of us.

It’s we who’re really out of touch,

We who’re lost, that’s obvious.

We’re the blindfolded survivors,

Cruising through life like Sunday drivers.

                             Robert Forrey, 2011

Rapunzel

Rapunzel statue in Old Market in Dresden

Rapunzel

There was a continual blather—

A family of squareheads, by the score.

No dear mother, only a drunken father:

It never rained but it would pour.

In the tumultuous household, no peace—

No appliances, no servants, no au pair.

The only time the racket would ever cease

Was when a daughter braided her hair.

It was a miracle on 42nd Street, like heaven.

The father watched silently as if in a spell,

As if he was a boy of six or seven

Listening to the tale of Rapunzel,

Imagining by means of long blond hair

How they could all escape the witch’s lair.  

                           Robert Forrey, 2011

Allusions

Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612), by Artemisia Gentileschi, 

who used herself as the model of the Biblical Judith (on the right) 

and her teacher Tassi, who raped her as a young student, as the model for Holofernes.

Pederasty

Though it was a dark secret during his life, the Rev. Horatio Alger, Jr., whose 

name became  synonymous with the American Dream, sexually molested boys

 in his Cape Cod parish whom he claimed to be just horsing around with.

Pederasty

It’s as American as alcohol,

As American as hot showers;

It’s as American as football,

As American as athletic powers;

It’s as American as Penn State,

As American as Joe Paterno;

It’s as American as home plate,  

As American as a can of Sterno;

It’s as American as basketball,

As American as Syracuse;

It’s as American as standing tall, 

As American as never lose;

It’s as American as owning a gun, 

As American as Number One. 

                        Robert Forrey, 2011


For an analysis of the pederastic character of Alger’s fiction, click here.

Appalachian Elegy

Plywood panels on a boarded up building in Portsmouth

Appalachian Elegy

I feel  like I am standing on a ledge,

Genetically speaking, of the world,

Where they are close to the razor’s edge—

About to be evolutionarily hurled

Headlong from their enervated station,  

Disqualified for not holding up their end

Of globalized digitalization.

With the Chinese coming round the bend,

The signs of decline are everywhere—

In the physiognomy, stare, and speech,

In the particulate matter in the air,

In their infernal tendency to preach.

And my only contribution is going to be

This pathetic attempt at an elegy.

                             Robert Forrey, 2011

Etymological

A stained glass depiction of Polonius, the officious adviser in Hamlet,

who tells his servant, “By indirections find directions out . . .”

Etymological

There’s more in a word than is intended

Or what is the blasted point of it all?

Definitions should  be endlessly extended.

How do we get out of Eden except fall?

The past tense of the word wend is wended,

But the word wind, to be etymological

(It rhymes with mind, wherein it’s suspended),

 Is what could be considered elemental.

Wind is from Old English, that which is bended,

Twisted, or not—strictly speaking—logical.

The past tense of fend, my friend, is fended,

Which word’s  not just apt, it’s fundamental.

The point’s not to be specific or shout,

But by indirections find directions out.

                           Robert Forrey, 2011

Troubled Sleepers

Sleeping Gypsy, Henri Rousseau

Troubled Sleepers

Dreams are the country of those who are lost,

For travelers who can’t find their way;

For voyagers, anxious and tempest-tossed,

On uncharted seas of billows and spray;

For pilgrims sailing for the wrong shore,

Beleaguered believers at a false shrine;

For a sailor taken up with a whore,

Or a peddler at the end of his line;

For a lost child crying in a crowd,

Or a precious pet who has gone astray;

For the sun all winter behind a cloud,

Or Bernhardt alone in a shallow play.

Blessed are troubled sleepers who, waking, find

A loved one next to them and peace of mind.

                             Robert Forrey, 2011

Not Now

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali

Not Now

The present, the now, is first and always

The imperialistic moment of time,

As if past and future were only a haze

Surrounding now—time’s moment sublime.

A trillion nights and a trillion days 

Exist only as the eternal now.  

Past and future are a nominal daze.

Now, now is—shall we say—the holy cow. 

Now is only a momentary craze:

Now is always at the scene of the crime. 

Now always plays it exactly as it lays—

Now is an irrefutable cliché of time.

And yet, there’s the dream of liberation

From now—in a word—imagination.

                             Robert Forrey, 2011

Einstein: Tic Tac Toe

Einstein pondering the problem

Einstein’s General Theory of Tic Tac Toe

His personal life was in shambles.

His marriage was a mess.

“My mind, instead of racing, rambles,”

He wrote his Yiddish mistress.

He was hitting the laughing gas hard.

He wasn’t sleeping much either.

Inhaling N₂O  by  the yard

Was his idea of a breather.

He was being such a dumb cluck.

He was being such a schmo.

His mistress told him, “Such a schmuck!

Tic Tac Toe? What’s to know?”

Standing at the blackboard, he pondered

The covariant X’s and O’s.

When his mind wandered, he wondered

What, if anything, a schmuck knows.

But stubbornness was his dominant trait—

His sense of destiny his  mission.

He was willing to stand and  wait,

To be faithful to his vision.

“Eureka!” he exclaimed one night.

It was better  than sex.

When he finally saw  the light,

It was N₂O =X+X+X.

                        Robert Forrey, 2010

Sphinx of the Sky

The Sphinx of the Sky

The landscape was green but the sky was gray,

gun metal gray, with an ineffable hawk on high,

suspended silently, like a sphinx of the sky—
seeing everything, at least during the day. 
Obsolescent oracles never try 
to answer the question why.


                                 Robert Forrey, 2011

Portnoy's Complaint

Original cover of the novel (1969)

Portnoy’s Complaint*

Granted Roth’s no Václav Havel.

But if it’s not the great American,

Then it’s the great Jewish-American novel—

Not Enemies: A Love Story, not Dangling Man,

Not Call It Sleep, not The Natural,

Not even the Biblical Exodus—

The sentimentalizing of the sexual,

The repression of the Oedipus.

It’s the mah-jongging of “Hello motha,”

It’s the de-shlonging  of “Hello, fatha,”

It’s the shtupping of the shiksa,

 It’s the rutting of the mitzvah.

Alexander Portnoy’s not Oedipus;

He’s the ur-putz—he’s Oediputz.

                                   Robert Forrey, 2011

                                           *Click Portnoy’s Complaint

                     

                        See Robert Forrey, “Oedipal Politics in Portnoy’s Complaint” (1982), in Philip Roth’s
                        Portnoy’s Complaint, ed. by Harold Bloom

"Sweet Are the Uses of Adversity"

“Sweet Are the Uses of Adversity”

 If troubles are really blessings in disguise,

Life’s  been very good to me, I know:

 Grave’s Disease, diabetes, depression—nothing but blue skies—

But what did I ever do to deserve Ohio?

                                          Robert Forrey, 2011

Confessions of a Shabbas Goy

1

For a Jewish crone thin as a wraith,  

Each Saturday, for a quarter, he lit her oven,

Which she could not do because of her faith.

She looked like she belonged to a coven

Of witches, with what resembled a mustache

And straggling white hair she’d combed with a rake.

Reflected in her eyes, each wooden match

In his hand burned like a witch at the stake.

He did not confess his sin to Father Jack,

In the confessional or the rectory,

But with each quarter he bought a pack

Of Camels at the corner grocery.

He misspent a long adolescent spell 
In an inarticulate Catholic hell.
                        

                                   *Click Shabbas Goy.

2

At fourteen, his ecumenical love,
Rhona Gold, the proctologist’s daughter,
At last agreed, wearing a surgeon’s glove—
A touch she added to what he’d taught her.

She was absent from school the next day;

In fact, she was out the rest of the week.

He was glad, because what could they say?

When she did return they did not speak.

A genuflecting Catholic reflects:

He had been her shaigetz,* she his pigeon,

But she was not just the opposite sex,

She was the opposite religion.

They were not a Capulet and Montague,

They were—what was worse—gentile and Jew.

                          Robert Forrey, 2011

                      *Click shaigetz

Sir John Gielgud Reads the Sonnets

Sir John Gielgud Reads the Sonnets

His reading of the sonnets is dreadful,

Perfectly dreadful, for instead of reading

He declaims grandiloquently, a headful

Of British ham on some moldy breading

By the English master of yackety-yak,

With an Intro by Harold Bloom, no less,

And a foolish illustration by Sendak

Who couldn’t possibly care and know less

About Shakespeare, a fitting complement

To the great blowhard of the British stage.

Do you see why I’m so impertinent,

Why this Yankee colonialist’s rage?

Gielgud was simply too much for the task:

Is a little less ham too much to ask?

                 

                           Robert Forrey, 2011

Sex

Gipsy Rose Lee

Sex

Few things promise more or deliver less,

Like a rat who can pull out of a hat

A long stemmed Rose in a state of undress

Who takes a powder in seconds flat;

Or a stevedore who unloads cargo

That consists of an embargoed tryst

On an imaginary Key Largo

In an archipelago that’s just mist;

Or an email from Nigeria telling you

You have won the heart of Miss Lagos

And sending your bank password in lieu

Of cash is all you do to be her boss.

Sex is Mother Nature’s way to insure 

That our precious species will endure.

                                Robert Forrey, 2011