Kroger's Honey Crisp

Not only is there no there there,

there’s little hair there either.

As we can very plainly see,

it’s the face of the immoral majority,

the baldfaced lie of the “billionaire.”

The nightmare of the American Dream

of men who cheat and scheme

to get there fast and stay ahead,

to prove they’re not a blockhead,

though that’s what they patently seem.

America, one nation under God,

where true religion is a fraud

and virtue is a will-o’-the-wisp,

a bowl of Kroger’s Honey Crisp,

which should be outlawed.

There’s no honey in it, first of all,

anymore than there’s beauty in a mall

or Gallic lilt in the phrase “cellar door,”

or a Walden Pond in a cuspidor,

or a trace of Elizabethan in “y’all.”

And as for the putative crispness 

of Honey Crisp, there’s more or less

of that than in the freshly printed 

dollar bills that are freshly minted

for ill-gotten gains that businesses

like Kroger’s make marketing

sugar, salt, and fat, targeting 

toddlers, teens, and obese gals

who are waddling testimonials

to the efficacy of consumer vetting.

What’s this to do with a president

whose vanity’s without precedent?

it shows how far a “billionaire”

will go to hide his lack of hair 

of which there's barely one percent.

                       Robert Forrey

Trump Tweets

In an interview, Trump called himself

the greatest baseball player in New York.

                                News item

President-elect Donald Trump 

campaigned snidely on the stump.

Scowling, contentious, uncouth,

incapable of telling the truth,

as if in a horrible life-long slump.

Each time he puts on his cleats,

he just can’t help it—he cheats.  

Ignoring rules, he plays games.

He slanders, traduces, defames

while he tweets, tweets, tweets.

He tweets morning noon and night,

tweets in the dark and in the light,

tweets both in and out of season,

tweets without rhyme or reason,

being both ignorant and uptight. 

He tweets when he’s stealing bases,

tweets when he’s tying his laces,

tweets when he’s stealing home,

tweets when he’s a gnome

in the dugout, making faces.

He tweets when he feels insulted,

tweets when he’s not consulted,

tweets from the top of Trump Tower,

tweets on the toilet and in the shower,

tweets tout de suite, unadulterated. 

Feeling feckless and wussy,

he compensates by grabbing pussy.

Then a tweet, like a song,

no more than 140 characters long.

His wife’s a gorgeous hussy.

Like mighty Casey at the bat

or the Biblical Jehoshaphat,

Trump will tweet beyond the grave,

a lying conniving knave

who’ll tweet eternally, rat-a-tat-tat.

From here to Kingdom Come,

he’ll be eternally unwelcome,

a Royal pain in the ass,

a slithering snake in the grass

disappearing up his own rectum.

                    Robert Forrey

A Man of Science

"The Doctor" (detail), Sir Luke Fildes  (1890)

      Dr. Tinker’s next patient was Willioughby Cranston. It was the kind of situation he dreaded, that he had never gotten used to. As a doctor he  was a man of science, but he was deeply empathetic. As a boy it used to pain him so much that he winced and looked away when he saw a seriously disabled or scarred person, particularly if they were young.

      “Doctor, is there any hope?” Cranston asked after sitting down in the wooden chair next to the doctor’s desk. Cranston looked like he had spent an agonizing week since  Dr. Tinker had last seen him. He looked grim, like he hadn’t shaved or slept much in the last week. The meticulous Certified Public Accountant had been a patient of the doctor for nine years. He had always been upbeat, trim and carefully groomed. Now, almost overnight, he looked like a haggard prisoner on death row. His rumpled suit looked like he had been sleeping in it all week. The white collar professional looked like a depressed, sallow, blue collar insomniac.

      “We should never give up all  hope, Mr. Cranston,” the doctor said. “But the test results from the specialist only confirm what I said was a probability last week.”

      “And time, doctor?” Cranston asked. “How much have I got?”

      Dr. Tinker paused a few seconds before answering, but he knew for a patient in Cranston’s situation those few seconds could seem to drag on forever. Being the bearer of bad news, the doctor couldn’t help hesitating, but he did not believe in either miracles or God. He knew that most people did, but most people were not men of science. The doctor could even have told  Cranston that he might live longer than the doctor himself, who was under treatment by a heart specialist and  was retiring in six months, five years earlier than he would have if he hadn’t developed serious heart problems. He could have told Cranston that he might live longer than he himself would, but of course he didn’t because that would have been unprofessional. His aim was to help patients, not to enable them to deny the truth.

      The few seconds the doctor paused might have seemed to Cranston to take forever because he had had more than one tragedy to deal with in the last couple of years. His  youngest son, who had been a star athlete in high school, had gotten involved with drugs and  had died of an overdose two years ago, as Dr. Tinker's  only child, a quiet studious boy,  had eight years earlier. And Cranston’s wife had died of breast cancer only months ago. The doctor felt his retirement  in six months could not come soon enough. He felt he had aged ten years in the last five. He had been a conscientious, dedicated doctor his whole career, but now he longed to hang up his stethoscope. 

      When Dr. Tinker reported the bad news to Cranston, the CPA’s  shoulders slumped and his fists clenched as he leaned forward in the wooden chair and stared down between his legs at the floor. The doctor made an attempt to get Cranston to accept his fate philosophically, but that had little effect. After the forlorn Cranston had shuffled out of the office, Dr. Tinker’s  nurse, Miss Truitt, stepped into it. 

      “Who’s next, Miss Truitt?” he asked. He was still distracted by the despondent Cranston’s departure. He could not help being identified with patients, or at least the terminal ones. But under the circumstances, there  was only so much a man of science could do.

      “Mr. Jones is next,” she said. “His file’s on the top of that pile on your desk.” She stepped over and found the file for him.

      When he had recovered from his wife’s death, Dr. Tinker had sometimes daydreamed about marrying Miss Truitt.  His daydream of fathering a child with her, hopefully another son, was probably only a fantasy. By the time Miss Truitt first came to work for him some years ago, she possibly even then had passed the child-bearing age. And besides the way things were going from bad to worse in the world, bringing children into it, knowing what he did, would have been selfish, perhaps unconscionable. As a man of science he wasn’t like most people. He wasn’t in deep denial about the impending climatic holocaust.

      “Give me a few minutes before sending him in, please,” he told Miss Truitt

      “Yes, doctor,” she said, as she turned around to leave.  

      In the few minutes he had at his disposal, he went into the bathroom in  his office to urinate. The need to frequently urinate was an increasingly bothersome age-related problem for him, just as enuresis, or bedwetting, had been a problem in his childhood. He hurriedly but thoroughly washed his hands after urinating. He never shook hands with others. He had delivered a paper at a medical conference on the health risks of shaking hands. “If Doctors Won’t Stop Shaking Hands, Who Will?” was the title of the paper. Bowing slightly was the customary greeting in Japan, which made so much more sense from a sanitary point of view, than shaking hands.  After washing his hands, he stared for a few seconds at his face in the mirror over the basin. He saw himself as gaunt and cadaverous, like a terminal patient. 

      At the end of the long day, bone weary and with a slight headache, he felt like death warmed over. He was scheduled for three hours duty that evening in the local hospital, but until then he had some free time for relaxation. He turned on the  FM radio to listen to classical music. But the music playing did not help him relax. It was  Mussorgsky’s ominous Night on Bald Mountain, which was followed by a top-of-hour news report that included  an interview with one of the candidates in the presidential election who was quoted as saying climate warming was a hoax being perpetrated by the Russians. Dr. Tinker  calculated that it was only a matter of a couple of decades, at the most, that  the planet would be “warm”  as Hades, “warm”  enough to make life extremely uncomfortable for many of the planet’s inhabitants, with the seas rising and shore lines receding.  He considered the term “global warming” a linguistic palliative, an ostrich-head-in-the-sand euphemism.  Warming indeed! He remembered when he was only a kid how a gasoline shortage had turned the drivers of cars in long gas lines over the edge. Road rage was just one way in which the underlying anger of human beings, particularly Americans, found expression. The thin veneer of civilization covered up the  homicidal impulses that men felt in extreme situations. And their impatience would be more pronounced in the most technologically advanced countries  where the inhabitants had been spoiled like the children in a rich, self-indulgent family. 

      Homo sapiens, thinking hominids, as humans flatteringly  named themselves, relied on their capacity for denial to deal with the unpleasant facts of life. They would continue to be scientifically illiterate, unable to read, let alone understand, the writing on the wall. With his scientific education and skeptical frame of mind, Dr. Tinker could not help reading and understanding the writing. He believed our days as a self-deluding  species was ending. It was not thousands of years in the future that civilization would collapse, according to the vague calculations that prevailed a generation of two back,  and not hundreds of years in the future either, but only decades when even the  most dim-witted  would know that something was going terribly wrong. The chaos was already being foreshadowed in politics where the emotionally and mentally unbalanced  were taking over, not through coups but in so-called democratic elections. A serious personality disorder no longer disqualified people for public office. On the contrary, it empowered them. In a world in which the electorate seemed unable to make up their minds, the single-mindedness of a nutty candidate was a valuable political asset. 

      Given their single-mindedness, because they appear so sure of themselves, the emotionally and mentally disturbed, oblivious to their own nuttiness, would be able to easily mislead the masses who, as Thoreau wrote, “lead lives of quiet desperation.” Facebook and Twitter would facilitate the dissemination of misinformation and lies. Delusions would pass for policy and idiocy for ideology. It had happened in the first half of the twentieth century, in Germany, then considered the most technologically advanced and most scientifically knowledgable nation in the world.  Slide rulers rather than computers were rampant back then, when the world was in the analog rather than digital mode. Change now takes place much faster and much more completely.

      At his age and with his heart problems, Dr. Tinker would probably not be alive for  the worst of it.  But the younger a person was, the more nightmarish his or her future would be. There was one blessing to Dr. Tinker’s son having overdosed. He would not experience the holocaust. Dr. Tinker considered the childless fortunate because they did not have to be saddened by the probability that their descendants, particularly their children and grandchildren, would suffer gravely in the relatively near future. 

      He looked up at the  clock on the wall of his office. His free time was almost up. His freedom to philosophize and fulminate was at an end for now. Though utterly exhausted, emotionally and physically, he had to get up out of his desk chair. He clutched the arm rests of the chair tightly to lift himself out of it. But as he began to lift himself up, he felt sharp pains on the left side of his chest. He sank back down into the chair, suddenly realizing he had forgotten to take his heart medication that morning. The vial was in the top right hand drawer of his desk. He tried to reach for the drawer, but the chest pains prevented him. He felt  paralyzed. Was it a stroke? After taking several shallow breaths, he succeeded in reaching the drawer. He pulled it open  and with a trembling hand took out the vial of pills. Getting the child-proof cap off was a challenge to any senior citizen under the best of circumstances. In his condition it was like cracking a safe. When he at last had it open, he poured several of the pills on his desk. Then he picked one up by using two trembling fingers like tweezers. 

      He stared at the pill between his fingers, which he now became  confoundingly reluctant to take  because death now seemed like the most convenient, over-the-counter anodyne for life. Dying would end his misery, would end his obsessive brooding about global warming. He had done his time. He had worn himself to a frazzle doing good by doctoring and worrying about others. But his sense of duty was deeper than his feelings of exhaustion and dejection. He told himself he had to take the pill. But was there still time? Had he waited too long?  He had to take it immediately, but his  mouth was dry as the Gobi Desert. He might choke to death if he tried to swallow the pill without water. He looked at the water cooler near the door. It was only about ten feet away, but in the condition he was in it looked like ten miles. He thought he might drop dead on the floor if he tried to walk to it. 

      Then he noticed on his desk the cup half filled with coffee. He usually didn’t drink all of the coffee in a cup. He had given up nicotine, but he hadn’t been  able to give up caffeine. He believed coffee was  the entry level drug in most of the world, except for Japan, England and Russia, where children as well as adults preferred tea. His favorite author, Chekhov, a doctor,  had told an acquaintance that “coffee was wonderful,” and he said if he didn’t drink it “my work suffers.” He put the pill in his mouth and raised the cup with his two trembling hands to his lips and swallowed the coffee  and the pill. Having accomplished what had felt like one of the labors of Hercules, he put his arms down on the desk, resting his head on them.  

      When he next looked up at the clock, he saw some twenty minutes had elapsed. He felt rested, as after an afternoon nap. He flexed his fingers, which were no longer trembling. Then he slowly lifted his arms and flexed them slowly, like a paraplegic in an exercise class. Finally,  he raised himself by the arms out of the chair. Standing up, his head was clear and more importantly he  was still alive. He slowly circled around the office a few times, trying to reorient himself to reality. He knew he was standing in his office, but he was not sure where he stood in the universe.  He knew what he didn't believe, but just what did he believe in? He couldn’t say. As a man of science, he  had felt obliged to wrap his mind around the theory of relativity, to the notion that space and time were curved and in some dimension ultimately coalesced. The universe was going in circles, if he understood the theory correctly. It  sounded more like science fiction than science.

      “Yes,” he said aloud to himself, as if he was talking to a patient. “You can carry on for at least a while longer. You probably don’t have much time left, but you’ll make the most of it. And stop  identifying with terminal patients and obsessing about global warming, at least for now.” Then, to keep his spirits up,  he recited a poem, “Invictus,”  that students of his generation had been required to remember and which he had never forgotten.


                                         Out of the night that covers me,
                                        Black as the pit from pole to pole,
                                        I thank whatever gods may be
                                        For my unconquerable soul.

                                        In the fell clutch of circumstance
                                        I have not winced nor cried aloud.
                                        Under the bludgeoning of chance
                                        My head is bloody, but unbowed.

                                        Beyond this place of wrath and tears
                                        Looms but the Horror of the shade,
                                        And yet the menace of the years
                                        Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

                                        It matters not how strait the gate,
                                        How charged with punishments the scroll,
                                        I am the master of my fate:
                                        I am the captain of my soul.

Confessions of Photochopped Chump

                             Photochopped Chump

It's rotten luck that we  live in the age of Trump

because, anatomically, he's the rump,

the bald boob who wears a wild yellow wig,

not so much a stag as a poltroon pig

with a porcine paunch and fat florid face,

whose neck disappears without a trace,
at least in the cropped photochopped picture
in which he looks like the bovine du jour,

enveloped completely by his sagging jowls;

who, instead of speaking calmly, growls

and habitually, while growling, frowns

as if the press and the rest of us are clowns

who dare to laugh at the president-elect,

showing his and the office no respect,

dissing us rudely as dumb clucks,

or, in Yiddish, stumpik schmucks.

He's a self-confessed pussy grabber,

a mouthing entrepreneurial voyeur

who embraces competing bathing beauties.

While they're getting out of their undies,

he slyly paid visits to their dressing room

(like to the blushing bride goes the horny groom).

He's the pageant sponsor, asserting his right—

the droit du seigneur on the wedding night—

groping and grabbing, stealing a cheap feel.

For twenty years he was the biggest Big Wheel  

at the Miss USA and the Miss Universe

pageants where he was certainly not averse

to pinching cheeks and filching fanny squeezes:

He was the idol of all the rich lustful geezers. 

When he'a alone in his Trump Tower,

inciters say, he takes an orgiastic Golden Shower,

he and his guests urinating on each other, 

a (li)quid pro quo, if not a measure for measure.
He's rumored to have gold-showered in Moscow,
the KGB arranging it and showing him how.

He told the press, "That’s a contradiction in terms

because I have a phobia about germs."

Is a Golden Shower his idea of bliss,

or only arrested toddlers' group piss?

"Mexican immigrants will be our downfall.

The answer, my fellow Americans, is a wall

the spics themselves will end up paying for

without our having to say por favor.

I’m not prejudiced against wetbacks

any more than I am against blacks,

though the government accused me

of refusing to practice equality

by not renting to African-Americans,

who I preferred not to have as tenants."

Out of the thousands of non-black tenants I've had,

not one of them was a drugged deadbeat dad,

not one of them,  including mucho Puerto Ricans, 

and even  the very last of the Mohicans,
who I called Tonto, who was a credit to his race,

most of which had tragically lost face  

on the reservation,  drinking  themselves to death.

But not Tonto, with the alcohol free breath—

sober as a Witness during Prohibition—

he knew like a saint how to resist temptation.

Though accused by the NCAA and Urban League

of not respecting their Kwanzaa and wampumpeag--

I firmly declined to accept wampum as rent

or to believe multiculturalism was heaven-sent.

I recognize blacks as bonafide humans,

but I draw the line with Muslims and Mexicans.

I believe a wall's the best possible answer 

to immigration, that malignant cancer."

"Hey, so I like to snatch a quick feel.

So what the hell is the big fucking deal?

You think they care, these two-timing broads?

Nine out of ten are ball-busting frauds.

In business and sex, it’s all the same.

Get involved only if you can play the game

or you’ll get screwed sure as shooting

and it’s not just my horn I’m tooting.

Us guys talk like this to one another.

It’s not the way we’d talk to mother,

or to the wife either, like my dear Melania,

who’s not a witch from Transylvania,

as some gliberals want you to believe.

She’s not a high-priced hooker up my sleeve.

Just because she’s beautiful doesn’t mean

she didn’t, to get ahead, use the old bean,

and the daughter is just like her mother.

Ivanka never gets in a pother.

She’s brainy and beautiful with long legs 

I paternally nicker-named her daddy longlegs

as I dubbed her bust my hope chest.

You can label that—for all I care—incest,

and call my economics trickle-down spittle

and my politics alt-right piddle,

but I’m president-elect and you’re not.

You’re just Democrats  who've gone to pot."

"I do not drink, smoke, or pay taxes.

My patriotism wanes and waxes.

I always proudly salute Old Glory,

but dodging the draft’s another story.

I got four deferments during the war

for killing’s something I deplore.

I’m not a pacifist, no crap like that.

I’ll bomb Isis to hell in no time flat,

and won’t take shit from Red China,

that teeming, scheming communist vagina."

"Yes, I’m a bundle of contradictions

about who you can’t make predictions.

I'll say something crazy one minute

and the next something just the opposite.

I’m  often accused of being a born liar,

but I’m the incarnation of pants-on-fire.

I’m a seventy-year-old hyperactive

kid whose muddled mind is like a sieve. 

I’m a nutty television personality,

who personifies intellectual paucity,

a glaring lack of class and gravitas,

always sitting on my electronic ass

like on the reality show The Apprentice 

where I acted like I'm rich as Croesus,  

firing failures over and over again, 

a mad sadist who loves to inflict pain."

"My critics claim that starting in 1995—

though hardly an accountant is now alive—

that I got a nineteen-year tax exemption

and haven’t paid a penny since then. 

That may or then again, may not be true, 

but I think there's another reason too.

Releasing my tax returns would reveal

that my vaunted billions are not real

but figments of my financial imagination,

like a president-elect without the inauguration,

or like my celebrated golden hairpiece
on which I have a permanent lease
and with which my corpse, flashing the bird,
will someday gravely be interred.

When the wind lifts it off my bean,

my scalp, like my tax returns, should not be seen.

My tax returns' untimely release

would expose me like an empty codpiece,

so to speak, for size means a whole lot,

whether it’s a penis, fingers, or a bald spot."

Yes, he's the boss who throws his weight around,

who grinds his employees into the ground,

exercising his rights not only as a man

but as an American free-market fan.

With him there's not only no hair there,

there's glaringly no there there either.

In the end, at bottom, his sagging jowls

move no more than his loose bowels. 

                                   Robert Forrey

Mavericks

On this, the first day of the year,

I’m wishing  you were here.

Time for the resolution 

before the inevitable dissolution.

Time for the promises

before the loving kisses.

Time to hitch up the breeches,

to pull off the leeches.

Time, in short, for changes,

at home and on the ranges,

where cowpokes keep track

of the strays who hang back

and the roundup that’s coming

of the unbranded and unbecoming. 

                            Robert Forrey, 1/1/17