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.