Elizabethan Sonnets

It’s a given, after a certain age,

when it seems everything has changed—

it could perhaps loosely be called slippage—

that some seniors end up becoming estranged

from life as  grizzled salts do, by and by,

from land after spending their lives at sea.

Like flightless birds do the sky, they eye 

the sea as fallen leaves might a tree.

Outliving contemporaries and fashions,

outliving siblings, even their own children,

as well as thirty thousand setting suns,

they long to hear the Host say, “Say when.”

Things out of fashion include spats, bonnets,

and ornate Elizabethan sonnets.

Robert Forrey

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

Christopher Forrey, 1972-2016

“My glass shall not persuade me I am old,”*

though it sure convinces me now and then

when it does not so much flatter as scold.

But that  photo of you Chris, about ten,

with your face painted white like a clown,

I treasure as young Adam did the garden 

and Petula Clark did the song “Downtown,” 

and Londoners do the bells of Big Ben. 

Your clown captures the mystery of life,

its sadness and inscrutability,

and perhaps, beyond the storm and strife,

above all, its ineluctability.

That you lived only half as long as me,

your father, is my most painful memory. 

                              Robert Forrey

*Shakespeare sonnet #22

Trump's Ties

          Trump's big tie (Photo from Esquire)


Trump’s the media’s waking wet dream.

He keeps the entire industry employed

showing blond bigwigs aren’t as big as they seem,

are not, as we learned from Sigmund Freud,

kind, considerate, and conscientious,

but rather lying, selfish, egocentric,

as well as compulsively licentious,

and, of course, above all narcissistic—

obsessively, pathologically so—

but also intellectually a cipher

with a mincing, corpulent torso,

a wannabe-blond bombshell like Pfeiffer.

Damn! He knows the size of his tie matters,

so he wears one as big as a clean-up batter’s.

                                Robert Forrey

Norma

She was a rose among thorns,

with the poise of a socialite,

the spring that summer mourns,

the dulcet rays of dawn’s first light.

She was a working class princess,

a faithful sister and daughter,

a paragon of thoughtfulness—

steady, come hell or high water.

But the opposite sex was her undoing

with their cigars and their drinking,

their chewing and misconstruing,

their habitual non-thinking.

Marriage—a miserable morass—

was the final blow, the coup de grâce.

                         Robert Forrey

Buried by Their Own Offal

               “Landslide at Ethiopian Garbage Dump Kills over 100”

                                                               News item.

Homo sapiens arose in Ethiopia long ago

and the first cultivated plants took root

there where now garbage dumps grow

like gargantuan piles of ill-repute

where the refuse of human consumption

rises like festering skycrappers of offal,

monuments to egregious primate gumption

that thinks glass, plastic and metal good landfill 

on which archipelagos of trash arise

on dumps predestined to be Mt. Ararats

where surviving Noahs, with bloodshot eyes, 

will find broken bottles of Bud and Labatt’s.

Progress began thousands of years before  

those titanic mountains of trash we climb.

When will return the pristine prime? 

No more! No, never more!

                             Robert Forrey

Paul Ryan: Marathon Man

The more I see his Irish face online

in high definition, the more it strikes me

as unintelligent, even asinine.

Second in line for the presidency,

after Vice President Mike Pence,

he’s nothing but a serial liar,

empty-headed, legendarily dense,

posing as a wonk and marathoner.

He didn’t win the only marathon he ran in

as a tenderfoot at the age of twenty,

a MIdwest wannabe from Wisconsin

turning up in Congress like a bad penny,

good only at one thing, self-promotion.

He's his own public relations agent,

addicted to a potent self-love potion,

with less body fat—he claimed six percent,

the average male's is 16 to 24—

but he won’t take off his shirt to prove it.

He’s thin and works out rabidly, for sure,

but unless they kindly let him move it

closer—the finish line he can't abide—

or let him at times slow down to a walk

or, like a dumb hitchhiker, thumb a ride,

he’ll not only walk the walk, he’ll talk the talk.

The only race Ryan might ever win

is the Stupidest Irishman in Wisconsin.

                                      Robert Forrey

Busybody Birds

                  Rubins, A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning

Birds are busybodies, twitching their tails 

and flicking their heads like nervous Nellies,

the antithesis of sloths and snails 

and barnacles on boats’ underbellies;

here one second, somewhere else the next,

migratory, footloose and fancy free,

tentative as a deconstructed text;

restless as a caged Capuchin monkey,

fickle as a coquette or a housefly,

with the attention span of a gnat,

with no theology or urge to deify

but as inquisitive as a house cat,

with a stork’s wingspread to lift it as high 

as a box kite in a buttermilk sky.

                              Robert Forrey

ORGANIZATION

Organization is the key to success.

Recognizing that’s the very first step.

Gainsaying it really creates a mess

And indicates you are a square, not hep.

Nincompoops have no organization.

Idiots have even less of it—

Zero, in fact, Hey nonny, nonny none.

Algorithms can instantly solve it, bit by bit.

They are organized to the nth degree,

In a manner of speaking, off the cuff

On which is scribbled brilliantly

Notations on space-time, that’s enough. 

                                Robert Forrey

Shitty Manager

Derek Allen, Portsmouth Shitty Manager

     
       A friend forwarded to me the above photo of Portsmouth City Manager Derek Allen from Allen's Facebook page. The first question I asked myself in looking at the photo was why would anyone put such an unflattering image of himself on Facebook, or anywhere else for that matter. I had already written about the City Manager on my blog River Vices, including another unflattering photo of him, a selfie (see below), so I knew that Derek Allen doesn’t see himself in photos of himself as some others see him, as a kind of human blob. 

       But the photo above requires further explanation. If I am recalling correctly, Allen, with the help of Portsmouth Daily Times reporter Frank Lewis, publicized a complaint somebody had made about how casually Allen dressed at city council meetings. Now among the many complaints constituents could make about our city manager, casual clothing has got to rank at the very bottom in terms of importance. A tie and suit jacket are no longer expected at city council meetings as they might have been in the previous century. Only a fuss-budget would object to the city manager’s informal clothes. Being the clever politician that he mistakenly thinks he is, Allen may have seized upon this criticism because he knew that residents of Portsmouth, who are casual in dress, grammar, and manners to a fault, would sympathize with him. They would feel, rightly, he has much more important things to be concerned about as city manager than wearing a suit and tie at city council meetings where there are often more public officials present than members of the public itself.

       I suspect that the reason Allen  posted the above blotto looking photo of himself in suit and tie on Facebook was to make fun not of himself and the way he is dressed, but of anyone who complains about his casual dress. The photo is apparently meant to be a sarcastic response to anyone who wants him to wear a suit and tie. He thinks he’s being clever in coming up with this way of responding to a fussbudget. What he doesn’t realize, because he is not half as clever as he thinks, is that he  looks smugly stupid, as well as a candidate for cardiac arrest. What he was possibly trying to suggest in  this photo was that his critics were being picky in complaining about his casual dress. He was trying with the collusion of Frank Lewis, to distract the public from the fact that there are a lot of things he could and should be criticized for. A more appropriate title for him than city manager, based on his job performance in Portsmouth and elsewhere, would be shitty manager. As I have pointed out on an earlier post on River Vices, Allen’s resumé shows he can't hold a job very long and his criminal record shows a conviction for perjury in his most previous public employment, in Piqua, Ohio, where he continues, as a carpetbagger, to make his home. Yes, the primary residence of the Portsmouth city manager is in Piqua, which is 152 miles from Portsmouth, a drive Google estimates at taking over 2 1/2  hours. He of course doesn’t make the three hundred mile commute daily. He rents an apartment in Portsmouth from a notorious wheeling and dealing Portsmouth real estate operator. Is this someone the chief executive officer of a city should be renting from? Just how many days in any given week is Allen actually in Portsmouth, and just how much does he pay for rent? Is there such a thing as a sweetheart rent for city managers? With the help of a conniving city councilman, Kevin W. Johnson, Allen's conviction for perjury was apparently not made public until after he was hired as city manager.

       In talking to a number of voters in Portsmouth recently about another matter, I got the impression that Allen’s days as city manager will end  before long. He made a bad impression from the start. Unlike a mayor, a city manager can be removed  at any time by a majority vote of the city council. That's a lot simpler than it took to recall a mayor under the previous form of city government. 

       Pinned to  the bulletin board in the upper right hand corner of the photo above of the bloated Allen is a hazy likeness of the Statue of Liberty. At the base of the Statue, many of us learned as early as grade school, is an inscription of a famous poem by Emma Lazarus:

                                        Give me your tired, your poor,
                                        Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
                                        The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
                                        Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
                                        I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

With deep apologies to Lazarus, I have written a parody of her poem with Derek Allen in mind:

                                        Give me your fired, your perjured,

                                        Your Portsmouth Shitty Manager who’s half crazy,

                                        But so nattily-dressed, so self assured,

                                        A supine carpetbagger who’s so darn lazy
                                       That all I can say is “Oops-a-daisy.

The Lazarus poem commemorates freedom. My parody denigrates incompetency, perjury, and selfies.

A Selfie of the Shitty Manager

Trump Links

“It’s not even O.K. to go golfing with the president, saying 

that it’s about showing respect for the office, not the man. 

Sorry, but when the office is held by someone trying to 

undermine the Constitution, doing anything that normalizes 

him and lends him respectability is a political act.”

                                                Paul Krugman

                    

                              1

If McIlroy golfing with  Trump was not 

an endorsement, then it was a cheap shot

by two con artists, Donald and Rory,

using the media to sell their story

by executing a clever chip shot.

A chip shot approaches the verdant scene—

meaning both the money and the green—

by lofting the ball, in a kind of soft sell,

Trump as Peter Pan, Rory as Tinker Bell,

cashing in like an ATM machine.

Trump’s a scurvy real estate brigand, 

born and raised in Queens, on Long Island, 

profiting from a life-long real estate scam,

making promises not worth a tinker’s damn,

smiling all the time while orange tanned.

With his torso twisting and his chin jutting,

Rory made his millions driving and putting,

a Catholic from Northern Ireland,

the United Kingdom’s no-man’s land,

where papists find it hard to find their footing.

His devoted dad worked hundred-hour weeks

cleaning toilets and fixing bathtub leaks

to finance the little shaver’s golf career,

while his mother delighted the little dear 

by buying Scottie Tam o’ Shanter batiks.

Donald and Rory make gifts to charity 

to maintain the illusion of parity 

between the strongman and the wuss,

between the rich and the rest of us

who don’t profit from their prosperity.  

Trump and McIlroy, the odd couple—

Presbyterian teachers, papist pupils,

sleights of hands in golf gloves

in a field of financial foxgloves

where their money quadruples.

                               2

In golf Trump’s such an inveterate cheater

that if he played his own mother he’d cheat her.

Even shanking, he ends up with the best lie,

and when challenged blusters like Captain Bligh,

not face to face but as a tweeter.

It’s really hard to know what he  thinks

when he’s golfing on his many links.

Since he’s unable to conceptualize, 

he obsessives over the small size

of his fingers playing tiddledywinks.

Because he’s not particularly well hung,

Trump’s like a brass bell that’s never rung,

like a flagpole on which no flag flies,

like a gossip columnist who never pries,

or like a stirring hymn that’s never sung.

Speaking of size, I perhaps should relate  

that on his Florida Mar-A-Lago estate

Trump  erected an eighty-foot-tall flagpole

in the proximity of the eighteenth hole.

Fit-to-be-tied, county officials were irate.

Trump’s notorious for innumerable  torts

and the eighty-foot pole ended up in the courts

where, snatching compromise from the jaws  of defeat,

his lawyers negotiated “a pole of ten less feet,”

which sounds like a puzzle by Will Shortz.

                              3

Trump’s a pusillanimous,  backstabbing 

draft dodger who’s perpetually blabbing,

who’s continually trying to save face,

a potbellied non-entity, a bonafide nutcase

who, when he’s not gabbing, is pussy grabbing.

If he would release his tax returns 

we could learn how much he really earns,

but he adamantly absolutely refuses to

release that information to public view,

saying it’s none of their concerns.    

If he wasn’t among the very prominent,

and especially if wasn’t president—

the quizzical equivalent of the Grand Teton—

there’d be those who’d say he was only a pee-on

in a Golden Shower that glows like neon.

When president Trump owns the venue,

it seems terrible but unfortunately true,

not only that he’s his daughter’s sugar daddy, 

but  also that the devil’s his caddy

and the Gold Surfboard his favorite hairdo.

And who created that hairdo, Max Factor?
Max wasn’t a producer, not even an actor.
His real name was Maksymilian Faktorowicz.
Was it he who covered up Trump’s MPHL glitch?
Only his hairdresser knows for sure.

When President Trump owns the venue

there’s  nothing much you can do  

about his excesses, such as  his gold tresses

and mad, impromptu state of the world addresses

because he’s allegedly a “billionaire,” not you.

                              4

And speaking of having little time,

Trump complained it was a crime

how much of it Barack spent on the greens.

When he was president he was Mr. Greenjeans

whose on-link lolling was pure downtime.

But now that Trump’s the president 

the unprecedented time not spent

in the Oval Office is allegedly as negligible

as the time he was putatively eligible

for the draft, which was nonexistent.

If  Trump owned only a single course,

we would still live under his curse. 

Even if he didn’t own a single link,

even if he had the ability to think,

he’d still be going nowhere in reverse.  

Some golfers lead normal lives,

have cars, kids, and love their wives,

but, unlike our non-majoritarian president,

they don’t believe they’re heaven-sent,

and don’t expect ballyhoo and high fives.

When the president owns the venue,

he doesn’t need to apologize to you.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law,

and it’s his balls sticking in your craw

and his clubs producing the revenue. 

That after all is the bottom line:

whose money it is, whose gold mine.

Whether you’re a peasant or a czar,

a round of golf usually averages par,

whether it’s  eighteen holes or nine.

                              5

But with Trump life’s Russian roulette;

he takes his chances and gets what he can get.

He’s a  greedy, pathological narcissist 

whom his brainless followers can’t resist,

but everyone else would love to forget.

They’re not amused by all his guff,

his holes-in-one and escapes-from-the-rough,

by  eighty-foot flagpoles reduced to seventy,

and other trumped up stuff aplenty.

With Trump enough’s never enough.

Because what’s at stake is civilization

versus nothing less than nuclear annihilation.

Think of the things that we take for granted

that may with his presidency be  supplanted,

such as thousands of years of evolution—

from apes to erect Homo sapiens,

to Captain Kirk from unfriendly aliens,

to liberal Republicans from Dixiecrats,

from beds of nails to ergonomic yoga mats,

from dreadful addictions to harmless yens.

                              6

The age of Trump is hard to believe,

and, like a virgin birth, hard to conceive.

Is it by chance repressed anality?

Isn’t that, at  least a possibility,

that it's a case of Adam and Steve?

The small stubby fingers, the very tight grip,

the deep, sinking feeling, the very tight ship,

the paunch, the jowls, the disappearing chin?

Now look at the trouble we’re in:

he’s about to hand each of us a pink slip.

Are we  failures on The Apprentice,

handicapped, without a prosthesis?

Are holes-in-one our secular religion

and is our Oxford not Harvard but Wharton

where the Golf Club forges links of avarice?

When you own the links you play on,

you can be as brainless as Ronald Reagan. 

Who’s going to complain? Only news freaks 

believe in those Golden Shower leaks

in which Trump plays a lowly pee-on.

Like a golf course without greens or holes,

or a materialistic monastery without souls,

are we the victims of a merciless heel

programmed to cheat, lie, and steal,

by one of the world’s great assholes.

                              Robert Forrey

Barking Dog

I hear a barking dog  in the distance,

disconsolately, at night, frustrated 

by its own inarticulateness,

lacking the words by which humans dictated

to it what could and could not possibly be,

not only in dog shows where some win prizes

for breeding and being a good doggie

but in dog pounds where a mutt realizes

it’s lost its master, an orphaned Toto,  

and among the hydrants where it pees  

there’s no Shakespearean pup, no “upstart crow,”

to articulate a dog’s epiphanies,

to use words as wings, to soar above,

skywriting a dog’s fidelity and love.

                              Robert Forrey 

Thermopylae

The narrow pass at Thermopylae

once only several hundred feet wide,

now, as far as the eye can see,

is over five miles from side to side.

Over millennia many’s the battle

been fought, gore and  blood spilled,

the combatants decimated like cattle, 

grim acres by the stern god of war tilled.

The name Thermopylae translates as “hot gates,”

through which hot springs of hell bubble over,

a cauldron of fatalities and sulfates,

like cracked skulls in a field of clover.

Mineral springs normally spawn health spas:

Thermopylae breathed brimstone and grew claws. 

                                        Robert Forrey

Ovid, Woody Hayes, and me

An 8 foot bronze statue of Woody Hayes in Columbus, Ohio

I hate the Buckeye state with a passion,

a state that’s never been in fashion,

a state of mind as much as anything,

a state of anxiety and Anchor Hocking,

depression glass and bug-eyed fiction.

Ovid in exile in Romania—

the literal Transylvania—

that is what the Buckeye state is like.

I hoped Trump would take a hike,

but he won here and in Indiana.

Why, O why, did I come to Ohio,

this rustbelt of hicks and no-mo,

this land of rivers and lakes polluted,

Midwestern pride strained and convoluted,

in cities like Columbus and Toledo.

The state of presidents but not prescience,

of conviction but not much conscience,

of Rutherford B. and Woody Hayes.

Of the latter I say, “Heavenly Days!”

He was demented with winning and offensive.

Woody embodied Midwestern lack of esteem

and became wrapped up in his dream team,

The Ohio State Buckeyes, which displayed

to effete easterners how the game’s played.

Woody was Ohio’s waking wet dream:

Thirteen Big Ten Conference titles, and trips

to more bowl games than the market has dips,

not to mention, at the risk of sounding

like boastful Buckeye braggarts, their resounding

five (count ‘em) national championships.

Woody went out of his Cotton-Bowl-picking mind,

punching players and officials as his sanity declined, 

tossing ten-yard marker chains into stands,

doing all but walking around on his hands

when his beloved Buckeyes fell behind. 

Instead of being institutionalized,

Woody became revered and lionized.

He achieved a kind of god-like status,

as though the object of a divine afflatus

that has been dutifully notarized.

At least Ohio’s number one in something,

in football, even if it’s sort of a dumb thing.

They’ve raised an eight foot statue of him

in what was a kind of Bronze Age whim,

rendering Woody Ohio’s ding-a-ling.

The great American novel is about where

the east is east and the midwest nowhere,

about a lad from the dregs of Dakota

who discovers there’s not a single iota

of hope in the wish “I’m not from there.”

As Ovid in exile longed for Rome.

I do too for my home sweet home

of Boston, “the Athens of America.”

But I’m exiled in this Siberia

with irritable vowel syndrome.

A man of letters, the a, b, c’s, 

a blowhard among the stooping Ph.D.’s,

a stoopnagle when it comes to the hex,

blinded by the truth, like Oedipus Rex,

I didn’t see the forest for the trees. 

I’ve been here for a quarter century

as if in debtors’ prison for penury.

In spite or because of my pain,

I feel I can’t ever go home again.

I’m like a hamstrung hung-up Mercury

who’s become a red state Appalachian, 

playing musical chairs, like Khachaturian,

without self-respect or clout, the odd man out,

the Lone Ranger’s “Get ‘em up, Scout,”

a rednecked prophet, an octogenarian.

Now Buckeye fever is less than an ember 

that I now conveniently can not remember,

just a little rust-belt historic domicile

where the banished live in exile.

It’s a long time from May to December.

I’ll depart in the form of cremation ash,

in a container made from a calabash,

strewn on the ocean off of the beach,

with waves of the future just out of reach.

Gladly did I learn and gladly teach. 

If only I had a tenth of Ovid’s talent,

if only I was gifted and multivalent

and turned my unhappiness into art

and talked to a partner heart-to-heart

instead of being forever ambivalent.

A statue of Ovid in Romania

A Murder of Crows

A "murder of crows" is a collective noun for a flock of crows. Wikipedia

1

       It was early March, with freshly fallen snow on the ground, and John and his four-and-a-half-year-old daughter Molly, whom he tended to coddle because she was born with a milder form of albinism. She wasn’t completely lacking in pigmentation, as albinos were, but she was alabaster and had the pale blue eyes and red irises characteristic of albinos. Father and daughter were taking advantage of the blue sky and windless day to get a little relief from their cramped apartment in a run-down building in a crime ridden-neighborhood. They were walking hand in hand, with John having the upper hand, with their earmuffs and boots on. When a policeman on a horse passed by and made a condescending tip of his cap to them, John felt safer, because even in daylight there were risks strolling in the neighborhood.

       Pointing to the horse, Molly said to her father, “Hossy,” and he had replied, “Yes, Molly, hossy.” Not far from John and Molly the horse deposited a small pile of steaming manure on the snow, triggering a series of events John would not soon forget.

       Molly who had watched the horse intently, pointed to the steaming pile and asked her father, “Poopy, daddy?”

       “Yes, Molly,” her father answered. “Poopy.”

       As if continuing a game they were playing, her father, to turn her attention away from the manure, pointed to their left at a prickly evergreen bush under which crouched a cat. “Look, Molly,” her father said. “Under the bush. There’s Kitty.”

       “Kitty?” Molly asked excitedly. That’s what they called the pink-eyed feral albino cat they occasionally saw in the neighborhood. Molly squinted to see the cat whose whiteness had lost its luster and was now a sickly gray as a consequence of its homelessness. John was not religious, but he was superstitious and when he had first seen the albino cat, he could not believe it was just a coincidence. When it came to spirits, he was more inclined to believe in the devil than God.

       Kitty would not allow anyone to get close enough to pet her, not that any adults would be tempted, and even most children, with the exception of Molly, looked upon Kitty with fear and a few with loathing. “Ugh!” John had heard one disgusted teenage boy say. “Somebody should shoot that ugly bitch.”

       John looked around, trying to figure out if the crouching Kitty was in a stalking state or whether like Molly she was simply looking at the steaming manure left by the imperturbable passing horse. Skittish and unsociable, never knowing where her next meal was coming from, Kitty looked starkly undernourished. But John never heard of cats eating excrement and doubted Kitty would ever, even if she were starving, stoop to manure.

       “Daddy, look,” Molly said, pointing again, this time at the huge ancient sycamore tree to the right of the manure.

       “Look at what, Molly?” he asked, looking to where she pointed. “The sycamore tree?” Because of a genetic glitch in their make-up, the bark of a sycamore tree lacks the gene that makes the bark of most trees elastic, like human skin. Consequently, as the width of sycamores expands with growth, the bark splits in response, like a wound, and then subsequently heals, giving the titanic trees the appearance of a battled-scarred veteran of sylvan wars. Since they are long lived, sometimes as long as one or two hundred years, leafless sycamores look scarred to death in winter, like pale but beautiful asymmetrical skeletons.

       “No, Daddy,” Molly said, shaking her head rapidly to emphasize she was not pointing to the sycamore tree but to the birds that filled it. “Look at black birds.”

2

       “God!” John exclaimed, looking at the sycamore, astonished at the number of crows that were perched quietly in its limbs and branches. How long had the hundreds of crows been perched there without his having noticed them? Or had they just suddenly swooped in noiselessly, like refugees from night, a minute ago?

       “Where did they all come from? How long have they been there?” John asked. Of course, he was asking himself these questions, not his daughter. The numerous crows made the sycamore, instead of its customary mottled white and gray, look black as midnight. Crows fascinated John, especially when they formed a dense black cloud swirling in the sky like a black tornado. He wondered whether it was only one crow that led the rest of them to suddenly change direction, or did they collectively knew which direction the flock was going, as an oil spill flows in the direction dictated by the composition of the soil and the inclination of the landscape.

       John’s wife Daisy had been murdered late at night, coming alone home from the local tavern, carrying her white pocketbook whose glass mesh exterior glittered under the streetlights like tiny diamonds. Because the neighborhood they had moved to was crime-ridden, John had tried to dissuade her from carrying the bag, especially at night, because it was an invitation to the predatory boys that lived in the nearby housing project who roamed about the neighborhood after dark. Turning state’s evidence, one of the boys had subsequently confessed to the police that John’s wife had refused to give up her bag, even with the knife at her throat held by a hopped-up member of the gang. When she started screaming, the hopped-up member had slit her throat.

       There had been nothing of value in her bag, nothing but lipstick, a compact, and other makeup. Daisy couldn’t pass a mirror without refreshing her makeup. She had been eighteen with a clear, glowing complexion when he married her, but after the birth of Molly, the bloom in her cheeks had disappeared rapidly, like a rose in an autumn drought. John’s own drug addiction hadn’t helped, he guiltily admitted to himself. Growing up, he had avoided all stimulants, even coffee, but not crack cocaine. He had a two-year degree from a community college, where he had studied animal husbandry but the only job he had been able to find was as an assistant inspector with the the county weights and measures office. If he hadn’t lost that job after a random drug test, he and Molly would not have had to give up their ground floor apartment in a well kept up building in a better neighborhood on the other side of the city. Haunted by guilt he had vowed after his wife’s death to kick his addiction, for Molly’s sake, but he hadn’t managed to yet.

3

       “Here, Kitty,” Molly called when she finally saw the crouching cat under the bush. But the cat didn’t hear her. It hadn’t heard her not because her voice was faint but because almost all albino cats are deaf, as white cats in general are inclined to be.

       As if on cue, like an actor in a play, one of the crows flew down from the sycamore and alighted not far from the pile of manure, But instead of approaching the pile, the crow strutted back and forth, glancing all around as if wary of predators. Did the crow consider the father and child potential predators? John doubted it because crows were supposed to be among the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom, with the exception of course of homo sapiens, the thinking hominid. Crows had been around humans long enough to know which types to avoid. But if it wasn’t John and his daughter the crow was wary of, was it the albino cat under the prickly bush? Was the crow even aware of the cat under the bush? John was pretty sure the crow was aware of the cat, because not only are crows smart, they also have acute binocular vision. They can see much farther and clearer than people. Why then did the crow suddenly turn its back on the bush where the cat was hiding? Why did the crow stand stupidly in the snow on one foot, staring at the pile of manure from which it was only a foot or two away?

       The albino cat took advantage of the crow’s apparent lapse of alertness to stealthily crawl toward the crow in the soft snow, hoping to pounce on it by surprise. But as if it had eyes in the back of its head, and saw that the cat was crawling toward it, the crow was playing cat and mouse with the cat. When the cat suddenly stopped and sprang toward the crow, the crow acrobatically lifted itself by its wings into the air six feet above the ground. Instead of sinking its teeth and claws into the bird, the cat sank its nose deep into the pile of manure. Before the albino cat, perhaps disoriented by the smell of the still warm manure, had regained its balance and composure, before it had extricated itself from the manure, the birds in the sycamore took flight en masse, swooping down upon the cat, clawing and pecking at it unmercifully. In a half a minute Kitty was bleeding and blinded, one of its eyeballs hanging by some kind of thin ligature or integument out of its bleeding eye socket.

       Afraid that the crows would turn on him and Molly, John picked her up and hugged her protectively. Turning his back on the carnage, he ran in the snow, putting more distance between him and Molly and the crows. When he finally dared to stop to catch his breath, he looked back. The cat was a writhing blob of blood-soaked skin, bones, and intestines. Most of the crows had already taken to the blue sky, circling over his head, blocking out the sun, perhaps reconnoitering. His heart was pounding and he was afraid the birds would attack him and Molly.  

      “Daddy,” Molly murmured, “Kitty dead.”

      “Yes, Kitty dead,” he answered somberly, and then repeated, “Kitty dead.” He took out a tissue and wiped her running red nose, He wondered as he continued to carry her in the direction of their dingy living quarters, wondering whether the solitary crow had lured Kitty out of the prickly bush by feigning carelessness so that the flock could kill it. Were crows that smart? And that predatory? Had they attacked Kitty simply because she was a genetic mistake, a freak whom mother nature had assigned the smart crows the responsibility of culling from the gene pool of cats? He was not sure. He was not sure of anything, especially not when, still carrying and hugging Molly, he looked up, not far from where they lived, and saw a murder of crows circling in the sky above, blocking the sun.

Patch Quilt

Women are the walking wounded

in the battlefield of life

of deaths never sounded

the casualty of daughter and wife

believers in sighs matter

but not the battle of sexes

of jokers that hem and flatter

then hit her in the solar plexus

cards with wrapped intention

from the bottom of the deck

the mother of invention

cursed by the monthly check

relying on her feminine wiles

in the game of hope chests

and of adulterated smiles

and abandoned bird nests

chicks flying the coop

the crime of aging

walking with a stoop

with regrets raging

trying gamely to depart

with a shred of decency

but with a broken heart

not to look back and see

like Lot’s wife, a drear miss

a sweet pillar of salt

a miscarriage of justice

fathered by John Galt

woven by the distaff

a beautiful female delusion

a yarn of colorful chaff

a patch quilt of confusion.

          Robert Forrey

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