536. Lullaby: Another Snarkie.

Snarkies seem to be preferred, so 

here's another, a lullaby in -- of all

things! -- rhyme.  How traditional,

how quaint!

       Lullaby

Lullaby O my dear one

Sweet dreams and good night

May demons torment you

And your worries choke tight.

Hush now my darling

These hours are blessed

May nightmares besiege you

With fury and zest.

Close your eyes, rest your noggin

And your brain full of lead

If your bladder malfunctions

Please don’t wet the bed.

Lullaby and good night

Since I can’t wish you well

Sleep deep and forever

Dear lover from hell.

Appropriate for Valentine's Day, so maybe I'll republish it then.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

535. Four Titters Crammed with Wisdom

Four Titters Crammed 

with Wisdom

Here is WISDOM crammed into three- 

and two-line Titters.  First, two that go 

together:

  Mind over Matter

“I’m not masturbating,”

Said the man in the phone booth.

“I’m having sex with a woman in Chicago.”

        Matter over Mind

Roaches in paradise.

Phone God, Porto-Potty answers.

And now another three-liner:

Pterodactyls

If you see one, you’re a poet.

Two, a visionary.

Three, a nut.

And finally, a six-liner:

Six Things That Keep Us from Suicide

A tight schedule.

Hope.

No gun.

No poison.

Hate to waste gas.

Diarrhea.

Coming soon:  Another Snarkie, a lullaby.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

534. Cranky: A Grump.

 

          Cranky: A Grump

Of the unholy trinity, Titters, Grumps, and 

Snarkies, we've met a Titter and a Snarkie.  

Here now is a Grump.

                     Cranky

There’s a crank buried deep inside us

That we’re ashamed of, try to squelch.

What a waste of talent,

What a loss of fiendish joy!

For there are joys in being cranky, consider:

Time is on your side;

We all get crankier with age.

You don’t have to flash 

That ninny smile,

Limp, insipid, forced,

When others flash at you

That ninny smile,

Limp, insipid, forced.

You can love yourself ad nauseam,

Every foible, every crotchet, every quirk.

A known crank,

You will be avoided by do-gooders urging you 

To save baby seals, whales, the world,

When, snug in your own tight nest,

You don’t give a damn about 

Baby seals, whales, the world.

If in a weak moment

You perpetrate an act of kindness,

You will astound everyone

And reap unwonted praise.

So what if people call you

An oddity, a grouch?

Immune to derision,

You will enjoy yourself

Unconscionably

To your brazen heart’s content.

So feel free to express yourself.  If the

mood hits, be a Grump.  And above 

all, ENJOY IT.

Next time, for the sake of brevity, 

three-liners and two-liners absolutely 

crammed with wisdom.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

533. Wishes for My Enemies. A Snarkie.

Wishes for My Enemies. A Snarkie.

Last time we talked about Titters,

Grumps, and Snarkies.  So now let's

do a Snarkie.

Never make an enemy of a writer; their 

revenge can be fierce. For instance this 

poem, which bears no dedication.

   Wishes for My Enemies

Bedbugs and constipation,

Irritable gut and fallen arches,

Relentless creditors,

Ruinous investments,

Disastrous infatuations,

Boredom, infinite and never ending

With a terrifying midnight awareness

Of their own irrelevance,

Their puniness

On this unfeeling earth.

Rather nasty, isn't it?  A real Snarkie.  

But that's not the end of it.  There are 

two more lines.

Fine.  But what if

My worst enemy is me?

So maybe now it's a Titter.  Certainly not 

a Snarkie.  To round things out, next time 

we'll do a Grump.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

532. Titters, Grumps, and Snarkies. A Titter.

NEW -- Titters, Grumps, and Snarkies.  But what are they?

This is a Titter.  It provokes a quiet laugh, or maybe just a smile.

    Wishes for My Friends

Chocolate truffles and warm pajamas

Naughty books, great art, marvelous sex

Contentment without boredom

And once or twice a year

A shock, a jolt

To break their habits, astonish them

And keep them stark and strong.

Next week its companion piece, "Wishes for My Enemies," a Snarky.  And maybe, maybe, an explanation of where these things come from and what I'm up to.

Wild stuff ahead.  Stick around.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

531. Killing

 BROWDERBOOKS

My historical novel Forbidden Brownstones, set in nineteenth-century New York, has many features, as the following tags indicate.  (Don't know what a "tag" is?  Now you do.)

• a young black man acquires power in a city of white prejudice
• an obsession that risks death by fire and murder
• the most exclusive brothel in the city
• a madam's fierce revenge
• the illusion of youth peddled to senescents and satyrs
• a sudden death in the parlor

Recommended by Sublime Book Review with a five-star rating. Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and WiDo Publishing.

                  

                                                Killing

When the State undertakes to execute certain convicted criminals, it gets messy, for every possible method has its drawbacks.

Hanging, the common practice in former times in the US and elsewhere, could fail to do the job.  Dangling victims twitched and gasped in midair, before succumbing.  

The electric chair was our bloodless, scientific solution in the US.  But here too, victims sometimes twitched in agony, urinated or defecated, and the eyeballs could literally pop out.  Messy.

(A side note: white attendants strapping in a black prisoner.  

My only comment: no comment.)

So today states with the death penalty use lethal injections, administered to a strapped victim who is mercifully unconscious, having been injected with an anesthetic.  But what if an inexperienced technician injects a muscle, instead of a vein, or if the needle becomes clogged, causing intense pain to the victim?  Messy again.

Pharmaceutical companies have become squeamish about letting their products be used in executions, so if lethal injections are impossible, some states now allow prisoners to choose the firing squad.  Which assumes good aim on the part of the squad.  And yes, messy.

The French have a solution, introduced during their famous 1789 Revolution: the guillotine.  It’s quick and ruthlessly efficient.  But it’s bloody, and there are all those decapitated bodies to be disposed of.  In executing people we Americans, like the medieval Church, have a horror of blood.  (The Inquisition condemned people, but left executing them to the secular authorities, who did it with a vengeance.). 

Conclusion: when it comes to executing people, whatever we try is messy.  Which gives plenty of ammunition (oops, I mean arguments) to opponents of the death penalty.  Yes, eliminating it makes for crowded prisons, and voters don’t like to see their taxes going to such institutions, which some people label “country clubs” — people who have never been in prison.  Prison is no picnic.  I know this from stories told me by a penpal inmate.  But it lacks the terrible finality of execution, the irreversible judgment of death.

This debate will never end.  Here in the US we have fifty states, each with its own laws and regulations.  And public opinion swings between the alternatives: death penalty vs. no death penalty.  When human life is involved, it’s not an easy problem to resolve.

©   2021  Clifford Browder

530. Kill

BROWDERBOOKS

The new edition of Fascinating New Yorkers has received two five-star reviews from Readers' Favorite.  Excerpts follow.

It is really a pleasure to discover all these personalities one after the other. Fascinating New Yorkers is a book that will appeal to anyone who enjoys an interesting read. -- Five-star review for Readers' Favorite by Astrid Iustulin.

Each character is presented with a sense of familiarity that is not always found in biographical sketches. This makes for an interesting read whether you’re a New Yorker or not. -- Five-star review for Readers' Favorite by Emily-Jane Hills Orford.

Available from Amazon. 

                               KILL

 

“Be a killer,” Fred Tump told his young son Donald long ago, and Donld has followed his advice ever since.

Not literally, of course.  We use the verb “kill” and words related to it rather freely, not meaning to take someone’s life.  For instance:

• You kill me.  (You’re too much.  You’re overdoing it, but I’m not fooled.)
• I’m just killing time.
• He made a killing in the market.
• She’s a real killjoy.

But the verb kill has, in English, a force to it.  It’s a monosyllable, short, quick, and clean.  Shakespeare knew it, when he had a deranged King Lear exclaim

And when I have stol'n upon these sons-in-law,

Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!

Have I ever killed?  Yes, bugs galore.  Mosquitoes, flies, roaches, mice.  The mice and roaches by using glue traps, the flies with a flyswatter, the mosquitoes with a quick swat by hand.  Did I relish these massacres?  You bet.  We’re all killers at heart, but in different contexts.

I once heard of a young man who, for Christmas, asked his parents for a motorcycle; they said they would see about it.  The young man had high expectations.  But when Christmas came, his parents apologized, explaining that they just couldn’t afford it.  The young man was crushed, then furious.  Knowing where his father kept a gun, he got it and shot both parents dead.  Then, appalled at what he had done, he rushed to the garage to get in the family car and drive away, to where he didn’t even know.  And sitting there in the garage was a shiny new motorcycle.  His parents had wanted to surprise him.

This is a true story.  The young man fled in the car, but in time he was arrested and sent to prison.  He was impulsive and prone to anger, but not a hardened criminal.  Yet deep inside him there was a potential killer, waiting for some incident to propel him into action.  Do any of us know fully what lies buried deep inside us?  Maybe a killer.  Scary.

Have I ever seen a killer?  Yes, at the Coney Island Aquarium: a shark.  It was swimming in a large tank, its sleek, streamlined body supple, its eye evil, its jaws equipped with jagged, in-curved teeth, so that the more a victim struggled, the more it would be impaled on those teeth, rendering escape impossible.  An efficient, swift killer, and beautiful.  Yes, seen swimming freely, beautiful.  But not one to meet in the open sea.  Bathers and surfers, watch out.  Sharks pop up when and where least expected, with dire results.

Gray nurse shark, Minnesota Zoo

photo credit: Jlencion 

In nature, killing is normal, even necessary.  Cats kill birds; do we then hate cats?  Once when, on vacation, I was watching a flock of migrating sparrows feeding on some seed that I had put out, a small hawk swooped down and grabbed one of the sparrows, while the others scattered in terror.  The hawk —  a sparrow hawk, smallest of the falcons — then proceeded to feed on its dead victim.  It was nature, it was basic and — in a way — beautiful.

Animals kill because they must eat to survive. To my knowledge, only humans kill for pleasure, for vengeance, out of hatred or ideology or greed.  (If there’s an exception, it might be cats, since they play with a captured mouse before killing it.)  And yes, sometimes we humans kill in self-defense, which, if true, can be justified.

A messy subject.  And when the state executes, it’s really messy.  I’ll go into that next time.

©  2021 Clifford Browder