Shitty Manager Allen at Wit's End

Convicted perjurer Derek Allen's at "his wit's end."
(In case you're wondering, the above photo has not been photoshopped.)

When he became City Manager with Kevin W. Johnson's connivance, I publicly expressed the opinion that Derek Allen, based on his resumé and his conviction for perjury, is not suited for any public office because he appears to be emotionally, if not mentally, unstable. It was recently reported in the online Portsmouth Daily Times that Allen complains of being "at his wit's end." What is driving him crazy? Apparently emails. He finds the emails he gets as city manager driving him to distraction. If that is all it takes, then please join me in sending him an email urging him, before he has a nervous breakdown, to resign. He will be better off out of office and so will the city.

Robert Forrey

For a previous post on Allen, click here

Lawyers and Attorneys

                                Honoré Daumier, Les Avocats

Lawyers like him give attorneys a bad name,

blacken their souls like smokestacks the air,

stomp on the downtrodden, virtue defame,

and always, always get more than their share.

Their patron saint’s the devil, whose cleft foot

splits the fee between heaven and hades,

as judges divide the ill-gotten loot

between rich gents and their shady ladies.

Lawyers are a necessary evil,

like consumption and IRS taxes.

They are to cotton as the boll weevil

and to shade trees as sharpened axes.

Lawyers live on payoffs, attorneys on fees.

A lawyer pisses, an attorney pees.

                                   Robert Forrey

Communication

My unhappily married neighbor,

a man in his mid- to late sixties,

said to me on a recent afternoon 

in the side street between our houses—

he was already well under the influence:

“You know in a hundred years

it won’t mean nothing you and me

were once alive and kicking.”

Retired from the telephone company

where he had been a foreman

of a repair crew, the men who climbed

(in those days long before the cell phone)

telephone poles with those contraptions

strapped around their waist connecting

them securely to the poles, up and down

which they made their way cumbersomely

to keep us all in touch with each other.

He must have been a functioning 

alcoholic able to stay sober while

he was on the job, confining his drinking

to evenings, weekends, and holidays.

A doctor of philosophy, I wondered

when he had first had the insight

into the insignificance of the individual

in the grand cosmic scheme of things.

He went to church each Sunday,

so he was apparently a believer,

but just what he believed would 

be hard to say with any certainty.

A teetotaling atheist, an English professor,

I didn’t have anything to add to what he said.

I did, however, think of a stanza

from Shelley’s “To a Skylark,”

which I recalled from memory:

“We look before and after, 

And pine for what is not: 

Our sincerest laughter 

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

                                            Robert Forrey

Little to Lose

Toulouse-Lautrec, Portrait of a Young Woman

“Resembling strong youth in his middle age,”

he was consumed by unbound vanity,

as if trappings were not mere equipage,

and vanity were not inanity.

If an aging woman is not aware

she’s not as young as she formerly was,

she represents the unanswered prayer

that children offer up to Santa Claus.

But a man who was never beautiful,

or likened to a blossoming flower,

was never captivating but dutiful

to masculinity’s dour golden hour.

While an aging man has not much to lose,

a gal’s a gallery with a Toulouse to lose.

                                 Robert Forrey