April 16, 2008

M is for Morris done in by a bully

M is for Morris done in by a bully
04/16/2008 - National Poetry Month post #19, part of The Unlucky Twenty-Six

Nasty Cary O'Grady was mean.
Dastardly, terribly, cowardly mean.
A meaner eleven year old never was seen.
Besides which he smelled bad from being unclean.

His father had taught him all that he knew
from sealing cats' eyes shut with super-strong glue
to boiling frogs on their old barbecue
and nailing a squirrel to a tree with a screw.

In school he made kids eat crickets and snails
and scratched til they bled with his long fingernails
and dunked their heads into sewage-filled pails
and chopped off the little girls' cute ponytails.

He once put a worm in the teacher's hot tea
and poured motor oil on the priest's rosary
and rubbed chewing gum in the mailman's goatee
and made little Cynthia swallow a bee.

On Thursday he thought he'd have some new fun
so he loaded and brought in his dad's old handgun
and waved it around to impress everyone
and all the kids knew it was no use to run.

And out on the playground he picked one poor kid,
a boy small and frail like some pale invalid
and spotty and squirmy (they all called him "Squid").
Most of the others had gone off and hid.

Then Cary made Squid stand alone in the cold
and gave him a target that he had to hold.
And then just to show he could be twice as bold,
Cary O'Grady put on a blindfold.

He raised up the gun and he held it out straight
and he snuck just one peek at his scrawny classmate
whose eyes filled with terror and anger and hate...
and he fingered the trigger and trusted to fate.

The gun gave a mighty explosion of sound,
and Squid was still standing, just looking around.
Then Morris, behind him, fell to the ground.
In the side of his head was a hole, black and round.

One of my writing goals for 2008 is to write at least one light verse or poem every week in addition to my haiku wednesday and fiction friday posts. I will try to do this on Mondays.

8 comments:

Blogless Troll said...

and rubbed chewing gum in the mailman's goatee

That made me LOL.

Loved the nickname Squid too.

rel said...

pjd,
Now this was expertly done, beautifully executed!
I'll have to go read the rest of the alphabet.
Now, tell me about your childhood again.
rel

PJD said...

Do you have experience with chewing gum and goatees, BT?

rel, I'm glad you stopped by. My childhood was quite, um, unspectacular, actually.

JaneyV said...

It just shows to go ya....with practice you'll get better and better!

If it helps I've been told that my longer ring finger indicates that I have a man brain. I'm dead good at spatial reasoning and apparently at Charlie loving! (That is not a drug reference!)

WriterKat said...

This one is really good. I love the punishments you provided Nasty C. and the cause of death was true to the story. These are getting better and better. You've really stayed the course.

Ello - Ellen Oh said...

I was reading it and enjoying it and then I was like who is MOrris? Read it again. Still didn't know until finally I read the title. Doh! This was good. Interesting though that the title character is really only mentioned at the very end.

And I read the unfortunate 26. Love it!

Chris Eldin said...

I thought the rhyme scheme on this one was very very good!

PJD said...

Thanks, all y'all!

Ello, I tried that as an experiment to see if I could pull it off. I guess it didn't work 100%, but hey, it got my poem read three times (by one reader, but I'll count the page hits :-)