Friday, June 30, 2017

There was an Old Woman

















Who in their right mind wants
to bring a child into this world
in which not only tropical fish
but coral reefs are imperiled,
in which global warming
is dismissed as fake news,
like when “the experts” predicted
Trump would definitely lose?
Have mercy on your grandchildren
by not having children of your own.
What did Eve need with progeny
when she already had a crazy bone?
And why didn't that woman in the shoe
cook all her kids in a mulligan stew?



Thursday, June 29, 2017

Golden Shower





"An uncorroborated report circulated by U.S. intelligence alleges Russian security agents watched Trump engaging in perverted sexual acts.”                                                                                                                           News item

                               He’s a joke from Berlin to Beijing, 
                               this fool who’s our president,
                               who’s persistently pissing
                               into, not out of, the tent,

                               which is not surprising.
                               Not only does he not know
                               Berlin from Beijing
                               but his ass from his elbow;

                               and it may happen now and then
                               that he not only gets (ahem)
                               pissed off at bloody women
                               but gets pissed on by them.



Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Our Smiling Shitty Manager




What is Portsmouth's shitty manager, surrounded by trash, smiling about?


Portsmouth’s Shitty Manager, Derek Allen,  is in the news again (click here), not for perjury in Pequa but for attacking the homeless on his  Facebook page. Allen has put his foot in his big mouth dissing the poor and homeless as lazy panhandlers living in a tent city in Portsmouth. The story includes what might be the most telling photo (above) of Allen's career in which he beams stupidly, surrounded by the trash of tent city, posing in a selfie like a happy pig in a heavenly sty in the sky. Et tu, Porky?



Sunday, June 25, 2017

The Double-edge


















The double-edge of old age
is that you forget so damn fast.
You no sooner turn the page
than you forget what you read last.

The novel renews itself 
by escaping from the past.
Books put in their place on the shelf 
decline politely to be typecast.

It’s as if you can live
life over, barely remembering,
as if memory’s a sieve,
flowing, not dismembering.

You see, you can relive the best
and bury the very worst,
pass the hardest test
and stand not last but first.

Your heirs might sadly think
that you’ve lost your mind,
or taken clandestinely to drink,
wondering if your will's signed.

It’s really none of the above.
You still have all your marbles.
Your heart sings like you’re in love, 
but your brain sometime warbles.

It’s not that you’re breaking laws
which old age is absently abetting.
It’s that the past’s not what it once was
and needs a hell of a lot of editing.



Friday, June 23, 2017

Avocado Cantata



          Still Life with Apple and Avocado by Dan Haraga


I had my first avocado in Las Vegas 
around 1953 when I was hitchhiking 
from Boston to sunny San Diego.
I had just turned twenty-one as I recall.
I was a college student in Vermont
majoring in English literature.
I’d never seen an avocado before
having grown up blue collar in Boston,
nominally Irish-Catholic,
I had eaten potatoes aplenty
until they were coming out of my ears—
boiled, baked, mashed, sliced, fried—“variety
was the splice of life,” my queer uncle said.
Not that he’d ever tried avocados
or anyone else in my family.
My reaction to my first avocado
was that it had no taste at all, nothing.
You had to develop a taste for it.
At least that’s what i told myself at first.
It was like chewing a lot of nothing.
I thought of it as “Vacant and voluptuous.”
That was the English lit major speaking.
What kind of poem might Keats have written 
about the avocado? “Hail to thee, 
Alligator Pear, puzzling forbidden fruit!”

Adam would have decried its tastelessness, 
Eve snickering at the sour face he made
when he bit into it for the first time.
I developed a taste for them that summer
in San Diego where they were a staple,
Mexico being the world’s major source. 
An avocado afficionado, 
I moved to San Diego with my B.A.
from Middlebury in Vermont
to pursue a Ph.D. at U.C.S.D..
writing my dissertation on 
“Keats’ Unconscious Craving for Avocados.”

I credit my advanced age to exercise and diet—
of which avocados were the staff of life.
“I’m eighty-seven going on nine-hundred,” 
is what I say when asked how old I am. 
But the truth is avocados and age
became much too much of a good thing.
I regret living as long as I have
and being crazy about avocados
from which I want an eternal vacation.
Even without any major illness,
life in the end is a pain in the ass
and I refer not just to hemorrhoids.
Global warming is now a reality,
not just a stark, hellish hypothesis.

The shelf life of picked avocados is brief
in contrast to which apples are Methuselahs,
but in global warming an avocado
is like a snowball in hell or a popsicle
in a pizza oven in Pensacola.
A peeled avocado is fresh as long
as a firefly’s flash lasts, which is about,
roughly speaking, 0.76 of a second.
The edibility of peeled avocados
can be lengthened with refrigeration
and polyethylene food wrap.
But what’s the point of it all?
Of life I mean, which will become
intolerable in the lives of our children,
which I thankfully have had none.
It’s a small consolation but I don’t
have to think about progeny
roasting in Canada and Siberia
which will be crowded with refugees
and where avocados will be sold
on street corners because in
tropical climates they will grow
profusely as fruit on trees,
which is what they can’t help being.

                        Robert Forrey



Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Somersaults





She was so unlovable the birds
would stop singing when she was near,
parrots be at a loss for words,
and blue skies would turn drear.
Spring  would come late as possible,
and summer seem so very far
and winter even more terrible 
than March in Antarctica.
Personally she was a wet towel
who was rarely ever in fashion.
Her smile was more a scowl
and worst of all she was never fun. 
But I loved her madly, for all her faults,
which I proved by doing somersaults.





Wednesday, June 07, 2017

Structure and Meaning



                                  selfie         


Thinking a lot about suicide
gives his life meaning and structure
separates the ephemeral from the puncture
that caused the crash fifty-two years ago
that killed his mother and brother
but left him unscathed with hardly
a scratch, just an inane ability
to recall the moment of impact
his VW bug colliding head-on 
with the fucked-up scrap iron truck 
that was in the wrong lane
because of the puncture
that caused him to lose control
with only one headlight
which made him think he was about
to hit a stupid motorcyclist
when normally he was trying
to refrain from swerving into
some unlucky son-of-a-bitch
who woke up that morning
without any inkling that somebody
namely him, who felt thinking a lot
about suicide gave his life
structure and meaning, was going
to crash into someone without blinking.





Doubting Mantis




The form precipitation took—
a pitiful, will-o’-the-wisp mist—
would have disappointed even
a dyed-in-the-wool optimist.

So a Mantis praying
for the end of the drought
looked like a grasshopper
discombobulated by doubt.





Sunday, June 04, 2017

Sonnet on Sunday







                          Billy Sunday Preaching

Like Clark Kent in a telephone booth,
Billy’s favorite colors were red, white and blue.
His favorite truth was the gospel truth—
he was one of Our Pilot’s great ground crew.
If he did not know what the future would be,
or what each wrinkle in time’s brow portended,
he nonetheless knew with great certainty  
it would be what the Good Lord intended.
If anything ever appears amiss,
Billy said it was just the perspective.
First turn a bit that way and then turn this
until you see the corroborative.
Nothing’s impossible for a man of faith
provided he believes what the Good Book saith.



Friday, June 02, 2017

Obscene Jester




"Mr. Met's Obscene Gesture Makes Crazy Season Even Crazier."
                                                          N.Y. Times


Mr. Met gave fans the finger?
On this let us not linger.
Yes, he has a big head,
But he’s not brain dead.
And furthermore, unlike Trump,
He doesn’t fire the ump.