Robert Donohue
4 Poems
Making the Papers
I was surprised to find him there; odd crimes
And madness seldom made The New York Times
(The Brooklyn Eagle liked to cover these)
Yet there he was. Why did the story seize
The wealthy’s fancy? It’s not hard to say.
They felt its menace; as they might today.
I found the details were a mystery:
He threatened people with a whiffletree,
(I had to look that up, and so should you)
But when inspected with a broader view,
The speculation, that was interesting.
It must have been some bad, new-fangled thing
Which warped his mind. What he had used to dye
His hair, perhaps? His lady had an eye
For youth, and his grey head annoyed her taste.
Or was it something taken up in haste?
Was Edison to blame? The residence
Had been electrified at great expense.
His daughter was the one who calmed him down,
And for a moment the entire town
Was talking of his fit. The orthodox
Opinion was not kind: dementia praecox.
Eventually it all was dropped; this link
Is what I know of him, preserved in ink.
Self-Care
I couldn’t stop when I would start,
From bar-to-bar free ranging,
Then what I thought was just a fart
Announced I needed changing.
Now honestly, I would deny
The truth about my drinking,
Yet I was drunk, I tell no lie,
And you could call it stinking.
An accident had stopped my fun,
My evening had been spoiled,
And out I crept, afraid to run,
Unnoticeably soiled.
I went to K-Mart, brought some briefs,
And found a stall to hold me.
Although the scene was primal grief’s,
There was no one to scold me.
Was this enough to mend my ways?
I’ll only answer: maybe,
But to the ending of my days
I am my own big baby.
Workshop
I have dyslexia,
And when I had trouble
Completing assignments in high school
For classes which interested me,
But had a lot of work,
I would wait
To the last minute
And hand a poem in
Instead of the work assigned.
I got away with it,
But looking back
I was like Jason Schwartzman’s character
In Rushmore.
When I went to college
I majored in pre-law,
Which seemed the sensible thing to do,
But during sociology lectures
I would fall asleep every ten minutes,
And my notes all trailed off in squiggles,
Like the illuminations
Of a bored monk.
So, I changed my major
To creative writing.
I can remember a simile I came up with then
I’ve never found a place for.
I might as well put it here:
The moon descends
Behind the hills
Like a coin falling into
A vending machine of nightmares.
Non-sequiturs
In kindergarten
When we were asked
What we were thankful for
At Thanksgiving
I answered:
Thermostats.
In high school
When we were asked
What we wanted
As a career
I answered:
Poultry inspector.