a family of strangers in an unwelcoming land
or warm lights awaiting my return?
They maybe don't know themselves
Which way they must travel
To a peaceful co-existence.
If travel is something they'll do.
They may sit tight, like me. Do nothing.
Like me. Dream big; talk bigger. Like me.
Like clowns falling back into a tub of
Whipped shaving soap,
We may all hear trombones laughing
And look at each other in dumb surprise
At how easy redemption comes.
I can say with candor surely
That I never, late or early,
Ever took a bribe clandestine –
Not so much as wooden clothes pin.
It's because I am upstanding
And my conscience is demanding --
But mostly I can shun,
Since I'm never offered one
Italians make their vino and their clothing with great care.
Rather than a wrinkled suit, they'd go around quite bare!
Rather than a vintage that is muddy and unsound
They'll plow the very grapes right back into the solid ground!
"Made in Italy" is thus a label to make heads shake;
That is why the Chinese slap it on the stuff that they make.
In Detroit the president was hailed by one and all
For keeping G.M., Chrysler, from a catastrophic fall.
He boasted in the union hall about his strategy
To keep blue collar workers in a strong economy.
The bailout that his government employed has done so well
That cars are rolling off the line just like a bat from hell.
Yes indeed, we can rejoice in what Obama's done . . .
Too bad nobody has the funds to buy a single one!
I'm pretty slow to understand the world I'm living in.
I always thought a troll was just an ogre's rustic kin.
But now I find that trolls are on the Internet all day,
Sowing chaos, grief, and simply getting in the way.
They creep into a chat room, looking for a lulz or two;
Perhaps they'll use a sockpuppet to mask their point of view.
Once they've gotten everybody at each other's throat
They retire to a coffee shop where they can sit and gloat.
Anonymous and puerile, they have shown the world wide web
Is bringing us much closer to humanity's last ebb.
The Chinese Cinderella sits in ashes up to here;
Her cities are polluted and her rivers fizz like beer.
Particulates are so widespread that breathing has become
A habit much like smoking – it's both dangerous and dumb.
The rain's not only acid but explodes upon contact;
Cockroaches are leaving and the flies have their bags packed.
She has no fairy godmother on whom she can rely
As the smog is thickening and shutting out the sky.
The government is Marxist but the country's laissez faire
As the people stuff their money in their dirty underwear.
Her carbon footprint is so large and carries such a stench
You couldn't even fit it in the Mariana Trench!
We'll have to send for Noah to bring back the forty days
Of rain before Red China can remove its filthy glaze.
State employees have the knack
Of multiplying back to back;
Where there's one there soon is two;
Another month will bring a crew
Gazing at computer screens,
Inventing lazy sub-routines.
Pruning only causes growth;
they are sly and nothing loath
To hide a job down basement stairs
Or hire someone to count chairs
At the county courthouse, or
Conserve the one last cuspidor.
You think rabbits multiply?
Bureaucrats don't even try!
Budgets are but harmless quirks –
The state goes on producing clerks.
We all know tobacco's a terrible weed,
But now it's obesity taking the lead
In funding from agencies who think our health
Is worth every penny they tax from our wealth.
So if you light up you are viewed with dismay
But if you are fat you're a star right away.
There's programs designed for the baby who's fat;
For children so chubby they can't swing a bat;
For preadolescents who live on French fries;
For ev'ry young sluggard who shuns exercise.
All the fat kids should be playing this smart,
since subsidies flow like a meal a la cart.
Skinny kids starving -- now they're of no use
In mulcting the government's great golden goose!
We know about each other more than anyone has need,
From credit score to appetite to last time that you peed.
This priceless information can be tabulated so
It predicts consumer trends or fav'rite TV show.
This flotsam and this jetsam on our roiling cyber sea,
This superficial landscape that is sculpted carefully,
Lulls us into thinking we have gained the upper hand,
That wisdom, understanding, are now something we command.
Build your tower out of facts and figures, graph and chart;
It will fail, since only God can know the human heart.
We know about each other more than anyone has need;
Our knowledge is as slender and as hollow as a reed.
Any war is too long but this latest is a pip;
Seems like it's an iceberg and we've only seen the tip.
Retreat is not an option and it seems that victory
Belongs to undertakers in this shaggy dog story.
When Rome fell to the Visigoths, the fate of hats was dealt
A fatal blow, since nobody was left who could make felt.
You may think this fantasy, but I assure you that
All of Europe suffered underneath the frail straw hat.
Rain and snow and sleet combined to turn it into mush.
It turned out to be brittle, and was so easy to crush.
'Tis said that good Saint Clement, on a pious walk one day,
Grew tired of his wooden shoes, which he had stuffed with hay.
Instead he spread some rabbit's fur inside his soggy clogs,
And then he set out steadily across the Grampian Bogs.
When his trip was over he removed his clogs to find
The rabbit's fur – eureka! – had mysteriously combined.
He had a pad of purest felt – the knowledge soon was out;
And hatters once again produced fine tops that had some clout.
So whether it's a Trilby or a Stetson you prefer,
Remember it's Saint Clement who transformed the rabbit's fur.
The government is listing everything from A to Z,
Which goes into a vast and secret Fed directory.
Access is prohibited to all except a few,
Such as passing strangers and the evening cleaning crew.
The list includes your income and your country of origin.
Are you here illegally, can you take penicillin?
Have you been arrested, are your taxes ever late?
Do you use Viagra and were you at Watergate?
Have you got a permit to go climbing Timpanogas?
Do you practice sorcery or other hocus-pocus?
Anybody wants to know about my private life
Don't need to hack into this list – just ask my sweet ex-wife!
Roasted yak for dinner, with a gutted guinea pig;
For dessert some honeyed ants and maybe mead to swig.
The more revolting food becomes the better some folks like it;
If your dinner is too tame, with surstromming you'll spike it!
A stomach of cast iron and some taste buds without shame
Are needed if you want to play this gustatory game.
Down the faded carpeting the ghosts of silver screen
Seem to tread in movie houses where the brass turns green.
Lonely little Bijous or the Roxy or the Audi –
Cobwebs camouflaging peeling paintwork once so gaudy.
Here come Stan and Ollie; over there is Harold Lloyd.
Barbara Stanwyck, Clara Bow – the queens of celluloid!
Wallace Beery shambles by, and then glides Adolph Menjou—
A breath of glory making this old firetrap again new.
These ghosts are easy to appease, as sure as you are born;
Just pour 'em out a sticky Coke, with incense of popcorn.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
