Sharron Angle

Reporters looking high and low are worked into a tangle,

Hunting down elusive and diffident Sharon Angle.

She's running for a Senate seat in Reno – that's Nevada;

Her campaign style is slightly crazed, or you could call it Dada.

Instead of beating down the door of television stations

She's a-bobbin & a-weavin with her media relations.

Her Tea Party supporters share her Fourth Estate distaste;

Pimping for reporters is considered a big waste.

She's going to the people, with no intermediaries;

Perhaps she rides on moonbeams, with the leprechauns and fairies.

I wish her well and hope that silence works for Sharron Angle;

Journalists could use a little civic-minded strangle.

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Prologue: The Boston Molassacre.

THE BOSTON MOLASSACRE

by Tim Torkildson

 

PROLOGUE

When Adam and his lady Eve were exiled from the Garden,

They found their appetite for food degenerate and harden.

Before their hasty exit they had lived on nuts and fruit,

On berries ripe and lettuce leaves and pallid bamboo shoot.

But now, as all around them animals did gnash and rob,

Their thoughts turned towards a fire with some tasty sis kabob.

Their roasted meat and toasted grain and apples baked in ash

Were salted with their very sweat, and tears perhaps did splash.

Those first few meals away from Home, without Divine suggestion,

Were probably bumfuzzled and invited indigestion.

As the years spilled over, Adam and his lady Eve

Learned, no doubt, a tasty meal precisely to achieve.

I guess the angels told them, among other sacred stuff,

How to marinate the meat and make it much less tough.

(Those who claim the couple never ate a piece of meat

Are full of prime bologna – prime bologna, I repeat!)

Ev'ry meal preceded by a simple, humble prayer.

Watching Cain and Abel grow, with joy and some despair.

The boys had flocks and orchards -- and I guess it's only right

For me to say they started the original food fight.

Yes, food became a staple of the strife that was to follow;

Either you were starving or had plenty you could swallow.

The earth was full of hunger, and of startling excess;

Murder for a loaf of bread . . . or something even less.

Bitterness was balanced by the constant honey bee;

Then by Gupta farmers who mixed sugar with their ghee.

Sugar cane spread 'cross the map, from East to Carib West.

Plantation owners sat at ease – their slaves could never rest.

Boiling, boiling; paddles stirred the cane juice down to crystal.

Toiling, toiling; masters bade them work with whip and pistol.

Black hands made the sugar white; 'tis written history –

All so English spinsters could have something sweet for tea.

What was left was thick and dark, which now we call molasses.

Used to brew up rummy drinks in brightly colored glasses.

Indentured servants replaced slave; the diff'rence is not massive.

The harvest was quite punishing, the workers remained passive.

Tons of black molasses on to ships were put aboard,

Sent to Boston Harbor and in vats right quickly stored.

 

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Part One

PART ONE:  WILLIAM DUFFY.  January 15, 1919.

 

"Honey!" William Duffy roared.  "It's honey that I want!"

"Not this damn molasses in my cup, you dear old haunt!"

"Tis not enough I work all day with blackstrap in me nose;"

"now it's in me coffee—d'ye think I smell a rose?"

Frumping down the wooden stairs, his wife of many years

Bade him save his hellish breath – she'd not break out in tears.

"Bullyrag yer boys down at the Paving Company;"

"I scrape it from the leaking vat and so you gets it free!"

"Tastes it, too" he grimly said, his cup held in disdain,

Before he poured the contents down the noisome kitchen drain.

"Out with ye, ye sodden louse!" his wife of many years

Called after him, good-humoredly – the slushy walk she clears.

She mutters to herself about the January thaw –

"The snow may be a-meltin' but the wind is pretty raw."

"No doubt himself will come back home a-stinkin' of cheap ale."

"Hisht!  And what do I care, if he brings me one full pail!"

William Duffy wends his way down to the paving yard;

He's fifty-six and shows his age – he's breathing kinda hard.

His hair is reddish yellow and his breath is rather ripe

From drinking too much coffee and a-suckin' on his pipe.

He labors with the tar and asphalt Boston streets demand.

Hands all black and sticky as he paves the Promised Land.

He's thinking of the many years he's spent with pick and shovel,

And of the land he left behind, and of a white-washed hovel.

He loosens up his scarf to let the heat escape his chest.

He wonders if a life far from Killarney is the best.

The boyos at the Ward Club promised him some softer work

But still he's pushing wheelbarrows like any common jerk.

He's voted for the councilman, about a dozen times;

He's paid his dues to Finnians, in nickels and in dimes.

His wife of many years must still take water from a well

That's near an outhouse and retains a nauseating smell.

They've had a peck of children—and thank God they all went straight.

Here's praying that each one of them will have a better fate.

Beneath the Elevated Train old Duffy stops to spit.

Commercial Street looks barren and without a bench to sit.

At the North End Paving Yard, not far from the Charles River,

Duffy takes his coat off in the tool shed, with a shiver.

Looking out the window he can see a vast brown tank,

Full of raw molasses with a smell that's sweet and rank.

"I'd like to live where you come from" he says to yonder vat.

"And put me lips to some brown voodoo maiden."  Then he sat.

His crew has not come in yet, so he plies the linseed oil;

Cleaning off the grime and rust from handle, haft and coil.

He stokes the boiler as the tar begins to slowly bubble.

 The fumes give him a headache and a bit of sharp lung trouble.

Duffy greets each man by name as they come trooping in.

He gives them tools and tells them where the pavement is too thin.

Today . . . today . . . the weather's nice, but William Duffy lingers

Over the stove with the coffee pot, warming his bent fingers.

His crew is gone to work on Charter Street, but William Duffy

Thinks he ought to stay inside the shed – though rather stuffy.

The smell of tar with treacle is not pleasant, but at noon

Duffy has a sandwich and is searching for a spoon.

He settles on a work bench, thinking there's no need to grumble,

but then he hears a languid and a gluey sort of rumble.

Looking out the window at his world about to end,

He's seeing rivets popping and steel girders start to bend.

He cries aloud: "And me a-goin' to those blessed Masses!"

"I'm in for it, Saint Peter – I'll be drowned by brown molasses!"

The shack where William Duffy sat – 'twasn't any Back Bay --

Disappeared and was no more – a quick and candied Pompeii. 

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Part Two

PART TWO.  The Vat and Deluge.

 

Brooding over North End Boston loomed a liquid threat;

Built by Arthur Jell, who didn't feel the need to fret

About the weight and volume of this viscid juggernaut.

It held two million gallons of molasses lately bought.

It leaked a bit as pressure grew inside the swollen vat,

But Arthur and his minions just continued to stand pat.

The company that paid him to construct it might as well

Be the ones concerned about the way it seemed to swell.

Arthur Jell, he sat at lunch, and had a treacle tart.

He did not hear the screaming when the vat blew all apart.

Like an earthquake underseas that vat of near five story

Unleashed an ocean full of fury and a malign glory.

Some say the wave was eight feet tall, some say it was fifteen.

It pushed at concrete buildings in a way that was obscene.

The Elevated tracks along Commercial Street were sapped.

People along Charter Street were seriously trapped.

William Duffy's body, the first victim of this breach,

Rolled along quite placidly and stopped at North End Beach.

Remorseless as the hand of God and full of brutal power,

The wave was clocked at going nearly thirty miles per hour.

It stopped the mouths of children and of women washing clothes;

It sent a dozen horses to their long equine repose.

Those who did escape its wrath could not escape the dread,

Forever after shunning candied apples, gingerbread.

The dead were stripped of dignity, were sent to common earth,

Losing life to something like a Mrs. Butterworth.

The victims – how they struggled! – as the rescuers did too,

In this ever-widening tide of grim and black, sweet-smelling goo.

Policemen waded in and lost their shoes and woolen socks.

As the winter night came down the goo, it turned to rocks.

Glassy rocks upon which men and women slid about;

Some were cursing, others uttered words much more devout.

Mrs. Duffy claimed her husband's body by the shore,

Where they'd strolled and argued many times in days before.

Horses, dogs and chickens covered in the sticky goo

were not shampooed or rescued – they were shot without ado.

The doctors and their nurses were in such a frantic state;

A sucrose-poisoned infant – how do you resuscitate?

Had a bomb been planted?  Were there Bolshevists abroad?

Molasses as a weapon did not seem so very odd.

Arthur Jell was certain it was Wobblies done the deed.

He felt that martial law should be immediately decreed.

But since nobody rich enough to have the Mayor's ear

Had died in the catastrophe, then what was there to fear?

Police worked double-shifts without a shred of overtime.

The Volstead Act was passed that night and church bells loud did chime.

 

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Part Three

PART THREE: The Aftermath – Lawyers.

 

That spring of 1919 smelled of sweetness in the sun,

As Boston Harbor still retained the colors brown and dun.

The fish had died and piled up on the shores for gulls to feast . . .

Another kind of scavenger arose for the deceased.

Lawyers in their morning coats, with golden pince-nez specs,

with spats and watch fobs dangling and often dirty necks,

washed over the stained cobblestones, to hunt for clients quickly,

who'd had a loved one snatched from them or themselves were sickly.

Lawyer Perkins from the firm of Perkins, Glade and Mounty

Sought out Mrs. Duffy with the promise of great bounty.

"Your husband died of negligence, of that you can be certain!"

He said to her while she gazed silent through an old lace curtain

At a landscape no more kind or welcome since her Duffy

Was laid to rest in graveyard full of grit and grasses scruffy.

She listlessly agreed to let him represent her case

And signed a piece of paper he did thrust into her face.

Lawyer Perkins was just one of many fine attorneys

Who followed conscientiously a host of white-clad gurneys.

Bean Town was invaded, had a field day at the bar,

With lawyers coming in from places near and pretty far.

From Pocasset and Plowed Neck, Belcher Square and Camp Mohawk;

From Housatonac, Leisure Lee, and even Camp Greylock.

From Pocomo and Polpis, Wauwinet and distant Squam.

From pious Assinippi, where they love to sing a psalm.

The courthouse was so crowded that the floor began to groan

As the lawyers set about their mumbo-jumbo with a drone.

The judge presiding over this assembly of mouth pieces

Decided that the building was too frail with old caprices

And sent four dozen lawyers out to lessen all the stress;

They wound up in a tavern on a permanent recess.

The summer heat of Boston made the pavement roast and sweat.

That autumn the policemen carried out upon their threat.

They went on strike, while jurists dozed through countless expert theories—

Wondering, no doubt, about the recent "fixed" World Series.

Had a bomb been thrown by some infernal anarchist?

Was molasses on their secret and supreme hit list?

Was the vat fermenting in the sudden winter heat?

Could it be an act of God – foreordained, discrete?

Or, finally, was Arthur Jell and company at fault?

Never testing limits on his giant gooey vault?

The time it takes one lawyer just to summarize a plea,

Multiplied by shysters to the final nth degree,

Equals years of haggling long after the molasses

Had turned to dust and various inert and subtle gases.

But Mrs. Duffy was at last awarded by decree

Sev'ral thousand dollars, from which Perkins took his fee.

Leaving her with just enough to move in with her daughter –

Ending thus our tale of Boston's strangest, sweetest slaughter.

                                        finis

 

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Don't Be Picky!

There's no fault insurance and no fault divorce;

There's no fault in diets, in crime and remorse.

There's no fault in parents, in kids, and in tramps.

There's no fault in prices for small postage stamps.

Guilt is a word we no longer employ;

We have many others that act as decoy.

There's victimless crime and a gal's right to choose.

ATM cards that become I.O.U.'s.

Nobody is sinning; that's so yesterday.

Fingers aren't burnt when with fire we play.

If no one is guilty and no one's to blame

We don't have to worry at all about shame.

Seems like this thinking ain't new, is it Dora?

It goes all the way back to old Sodom-Gomorrah. 

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