One day Frick when to the place to buy some stuff
While Frack stayed in the area to do some things
Frack tossed out some junk
He used the the whatchamacallit to clean the thingamajig
Pick up the odds and ends
And he scrubbed a doodad with the thingamabob


Frick purchesed some knickknacks and bric-a-brac
A few sundries
A couple of tchotkes and trinkets
Some whatnot
A gizmo
A gadget
And more miscellaneous paraphernalia

When Frick got home Frack asked "What'd you buy?"
Frick said " Oh, this and that" "What'd you do all day?"
Frack said "Just a hodgepodge of etcetera, etcetera"
       -Tommy Johnson

When Alison left the bath to run
It ruined the parquet floor,
It spilled on out like a waterspout
And ran right under the door,
She’d gone back into the bedroom, so
The spill continued to run,
Across the landing and down the stair,
‘Now look what our daughter’s done!’

We couldn’t dry out the parquetry
It swelled, and loosened the glue,
Then bits would lift and would come adrift,
I didn’t know what to do.
Then Barbara said, ‘It’s coming up,
We shouldn’t have laid it down,
I’ll go and choose some ceramic tiles
At that tiling place in town.’

I said that I’d lay the tiles myself
But Barbara would insist,
‘We really need a professional
For a job as big as this.’
I shrugged, and let her get on with it
I never could win a trick,
So the tiler that she employed was one
Ahab Nathaniel Frick.

I’d seen this tiler about the town
All hunched, and wizened and old,
His wrinkled skin was like parchment in
Some leathery paperfold.
He wore a hat with a drooping brim
So the sun never touched his face,
A puff of wind would have blown him in
To leave not a hint, or trace.

‘Are you sure that he’s up to this,’ I said,
‘He isn’t the best of men,
He’ll probably get on his knees all right
But never get up again.’
But Barbara shushed me out of there
Was keeping me well at bay,
She wanted to prove what she could do
In laying the tiles her way.

I didn’t get in to see them then
‘Til the tiles were laid, with grout,
Nor see Nathaniel Frick again,
I supposed that he’d gone out.
I stood and stared at the new laid tiles,
Their pattern was in the floor,
And Barbara, waiting proudly said,
‘What are you staring for?’

‘There’s something a-swirl in those tiles,’ I said,
‘Some pattern you didn’t mean,
The way that he’s put them together, well
There’s a sense of something unclean!’
I said the tiles made an evil face
And showed her the curving jaw,
The squinting eyes that could hypnotise
And the cheeks, so sallow and raw.

She said that she couldn’t see it then,
That I must have twisted eyes,
I wasn’t wanting to hurt her so
I tried to sympathise,
But the monster’s face was set in space
And it wouldn’t go away,
I dreamt about that face by night
And I saw it, every day.

At night, the face seemed to snarl at me
When I passed it in the gloom,
And I worried that it was set right there
Outside our daughter’s room,
Then Barbara thought she heard a noise,
An intruder in the house,
And tipped me out of the bed to chase
The night intruder out.

The moans began in the early hours
And the groans came just at dawn,
Then Alison came into our room,
‘There’s a shadow on my wall!
A man with a broad-brimmed, floppy hat
And with squinting eyes that gleamed,’
I said, ‘That’s it,’ when she had a fit
And our darling daughter screamed!

I went on out to the lumber shed
And I brought a mattock in,
While Alison jumped in the double bed
As the tiles set up a din,
A wailing, groaning, squealing sound
That would raise the peaceful dead,
I raised the mattock and smashed the tiles
Just above the monster’s head.

The tiles rose up with a mighty roar
And shattered, scattered around,
As a shadow from underneath the floor
Rose up with a dreadful sound,
It hissed, and made for the stairway, leapt
And it almost made me sick,
For fleeing out of the open door
Was Ahab Nathaniel Frick!

David Lewis Paget

Your name,
has become a curse word that falls from my lips.
The picture of you in my head,
has become blurred and wants to be forgotten.
Your voice,
has become a door that lacks oil.
The way you move your body,
must be because of your deceiving bones.
Your rat like eyes,
have become the worst color of diarrhea.
I know this is not the just the “Call out a back stabbers” poem,
lets name the flaws on and in my own skin,
that just so happened,
to be pointed out by you.
As you covered my face in nine pounds of a “makeover”,
you said you couldn’t see the flaws on my skin anymore.
Flaws?
You went far enough to point the pubescent scars.
of my lips, cheeks, and chin.
The shyness I have of talking to my friends,
was pointed out because you didn’t have someone to talk to that night.
Excuse me,
but I thought the effort of the friendship was supposed to be put forth by both “friends”?
Next,
near the end of the friendship,
you often told me I was a terrible friend.
I cried.
A lot.
Later when that came up,
you told me you were just trying to make a point.
Why as a friend didn’t you just try to talk to me,
instead of trying to start insignificant bull crap?
But here I sit now,
with friends that could always be so much better than you.
I often hear your snickering words behind me a your lunch table,
and I turn around and smile at you and your “friend’.
You usually **** your head in confusion,
but really,
that's me.
The 15 year old giant ginger with a second graders personality,
stinking my pinky finger up at you to flip you off in Chinese,
and to say in a nonexistent voice,
“frick you”.

11-6-14
I saw my name on your contacts list
and wondered how many times your finger hovered over the "call" button.
---
I hope you, or at least someone
thinks at least some things about me are cute
the way my hair sticks up and then flops over when I try to fix it
and, when pinned up,  the way it becomes gradually messier over the course of the day.
When I mouth the words to a song on the school bus,
scrunching my eyes and headbanging,
or when I spin around on my heels, and try to look graceful.
---
Frick, I shouldn't try to write about love, i'm just a thirteen-year-old girl
who grew up on the internet
and doesn't care about the ****** music she's listening to.

It's easy to say things when they don't mean anything,
and that's how I've always gotten by.
But then I said something that ripped off my skin,
and my sea-soaked beauty didn't want to give in.
She ****** me, I ****** her,
we danced all night,
I wrote her a poem,
when I forgot how to write.

So let us now place monetary value on information.
Let us return to the source,
Mining & prospecting that fertile intel seam.
To wit: WWII and G-2 shenanigans.
Wild Bill and OSS-capades,
Artificial disseminations.
Partial recriminations.
And PSYOPS:
A literary nightmare--
THE CYCLOPS from The Odyssey,
For example,
If you lack your own,
Your own personal Bogey Man.
Or men. For me:
Allen Dulles or Richard Helms.

The Intelligence Community:
It was a small tightly knit crew,
Less than battalion strength in 1942;
A few myopic soldiers,
Who, although could barely type,
Were still too cerebral to
Waste as infantry fodder.
It was a huge converted Army-green warehouse,
Space strategically partitioned,
Sectioned off into cubicle-like spaces,
By giant 4-drawer file cabinets
Standing tall like MPs,
Sentinels & Guardians,
Monuments to pre-electronic storage,
Data relatively comprehensive, and an
Archive secretive & intimidating.

Within the Army-green incunabula,
Scattered throughout the intel landscape,
Here and there a few commissioned officers,
A smattering of college psychology majors,
Personalities with predilections,
And penchants for mind games.
These self same WWII vets,
Would morph into Cold War Mad Men.
Stalwart, stouthearted men of Eisenhower,
And J. Walter Thompson,
De-mobbed, as they say in the UK.
Consumptive.
Self-indulgent,
Particularly when it came to the kids;
Children of the peace,
Called Baby-Boomers,
An entire generation enabled & destroyed.
Who would produce little of value
Except medical marijuana and
Coupons, clipped by that sober ruling class—
Fat interest-bearing college-loan portfolios
Held by that neo-Calvinist Elect: The 1%.
Fat cats one and all,
Loaded dice & canasta cronies--
In concert a stacked deck,
“Una mano lava l'altra.”
The words of my namesake--
My grandfather Giuseppe--
His vowels reverberating,
Rattling in my dreams.
Not friends, but
Fiends in high places, like
The Fed and dark liquid pools.
Thank you, Barack, for
Fooling us again.
For giving us
“Belief we can believe in.”

But I digress.
It was when the Government Secrecy Act,
In all its transnational incarnations,
Embraced capitalism in a big way,
Elevating the ideology to whole-Earth saturation,
Systemizing the ethos of Darwin,
Into one global Moby ****,
One solitary leviathan,
A multi-level marketing labyrinth,
Where wealth is the end game--
Greed: pure, unbridled & unrestrained.
Bond--James Bond—
Did his bit, supplying catchy
Slogans & tag-lines:
“For Your Eyes Only.”
“On a need to know basis.”
“Confidential Information.”
“Top & Ultra-Top Secret.”
“Hush, Hush & a Bag of Chips.”

The sealed letter sits in a locked drawer,
In that stout desk,
In the Oval Office
In The White House,
“To be opened by my VP in the event of my death.”
Another staggering work,
Of achy-achy-heart breaking genius,
The culture commoditized,
A disease containing its own cure,
Assayed, graded,
Portioned & packaged.
Priced accordingly,
To a logic that goes something like:
“Anything this tightly controlled,
Anything the government deems to be
This illegitimate and/or & secret
Must be really, really God-awesome,
Must really be Da ******* Bomb.”

Brother Coolidge was right:
“The Business of America is Business.”
And INFORMATION:
“The Most Valuable Commodity on Earth.”
So said Stanford Stuyvesant Whitehead III,
19th Century robber baron, and
Consummate Fat Cat.
Get the picture:
We were smoking cigars and sipping cognac,
Mighty comfortable in leather armchairs,
Muted billiard clicks,
Punctuating the atmosphere
In this spacious lounge,
His East Side
Downtown & private
Manhattan club.
I, his guest, had not the slightest idea
Why I was there.
"By God, man," he went on,
My eyes speared by his laser gaze,
His bushy eyebrows,
His monocle.
His bulbous nose;
His thick wet mustache.
And those EYES:  
Those crazy,
Insane eyes.

"I am talking about a profound change,” he continued.
“Back when the steamship
Gave way to electronic wireless radio."
He puffed smoke,
Removing the cigar from his mouth,
Holding it,
Examining it critically for a moment.
"I'm talking about communication,
Instant communication
With business associates, &
Cronies far away,
Way out there,
Far beyond the places we know well.
Picture it:
You're running a fleet of
Ramshackle Filipino banana boats,
Out of some nameless cove,
Indenting the south coast of Mindanao.
A cyclone comes out of nowhere.
Good God--there’s sixteen banana-packed
Coal burners lying on the bottom of the Celebes Sea.
Think about it:
You've got telegraph radio.
Everyone else has the post office.
Now, I ask you:
‘Who's going long,
Who’s getting rich on the
Caracas Banana Exchange?’
Good Lord, man, it would be
Like being omniscient!"
“This very conversation,” he went on,
“Could well be a verbatim transcription
Of a conversation right here in this very room,
Between people like: J. Pierpont Morgan
And some lesser Gilded Age nabob;
Some Astor, some Rockefeller,
A Gould or Vanderbilt,
Whitney or Duke,
Some Frick or Warburg--
To name just a few, old sport.”
He stopped suddenly.
He looked down at his hands,
As we both realized he had counted these names
Out on his fat curled fingers.
He looked at me and smiled.
I was afraid.
Why had I been invited to this meeting?
I smiled back at him,
Doing my best to mirror his
Carnivorous menace.

I knew it.
He knew it.
He knew I knew it.
Mr. Whitehead’s growling rabid jowls,
His slobbering canine smile held me steady.
“Okay. Touché. ‘Ya got me.”
He shook off the phony smile,
An absence, accentuating
His stare: lethal, carnal & rare.
“I never had much formal schooling.
I’ve been hungry.
Hungry enough to know for sure
That the correct fork,
Don’t mean ***** from shinola.
When I’m dining out, fancy-like,
Me manners is the least of me problems,
Far less important than
The dinner chit they
Hand me after I slake
My thirst & appetite.”
Again, he stopped suddenly,
Recognizing that, perhaps,
He’d revealed too much of his
Bedford-Stuyvesant pedigree.
He turned again and stared at me.
“None of that,” he said.
“None of that means squat to me, Boyo.
What matters now is I’m rich.
I’ve got mine, By God,
And ******* It!
Tough ***** on the rest of you losers;
The rest of you fecking whiners can go
**** yourselves over at Zuccotti Park.”
He pounded the armrest,
The padded armrest of the rich Corinthian leather—
( . . . ***, Ricardo?
Get your Montalbán
Mexicano ***, back in
Random Access Memory Land,
Where you belong.
**** ya’ Fantasy Island
Hospitality, Mr. Roarke,
Go be wrathful Khan Noon Singh,
Somewhere else.
Now is not the time, or,
Let me rephrase that:
This narrative will not allow your meme here . . .)    

Whitehead pounds the armrest again.
“My point is this:  
None of JP Morgan’s decidedly,
un-nattering lesser nabobs of negativity . . .”
BAM!  Again, he pounded the leather . . .

(Back in your ******* hole, Spiro!
Do you realize just how far back,
Just how far back
Maryland’s reputation
Has been set back by your venality?
Not to mention any shot at ethnic assimilation,
The rest of us grease ball non-Wasps
Have in this country?
You ******* Greek!)

I stopped thinking
When I realized Stanford Stuyvesant Whitehead III
Was reading my mind.
“So that’s what it’s really all about,” he said,
Rank smugness in his voice.
“So, I’m just a nouveau riche upstart,
A socially inept parvenu,
Yet they still let me
Join their tony clubs.
It chaps your ***, Boyo, don’t it?
I’m still Scotch-Irish, and
A WASP, Laddie.
Something your skinny
Greaser-Guinea-****-Spaghetti-*** ***,
Ain’t ever gonna be.”
But I digress, again.

So I joined one of Uncle Sam’s
Lesser-known clandestine services,
An assignment appropriate to my ethnic identity,
Namely GLADIO in Italy,
A NATO stay-behind operation &
Cold-War comedy.
I infiltrated the Brigate Rosse.
I drove the Aldo Moro kidnap vehicle.
I cooked minestrone for General Dozier.
I sliced off J. Paul Getty’s ear in Calabria.
Ironically, I lost my hearing during
The Stazione Bologna bombing.
I am consequently pensioned off,
Off both the radar and the payroll.
Years later now,
I live in one of those gated, golf-coursed,
Over-55, sunny southern California
Lunatic asylums.

Most days I am drunk at 9 AM.
I fill Bukowski mornings,
Conjuring up Jane Fonda,
Jazzercised in camo spandex.
She is high atop a Vietcong tank in Hanoi.
Or Daniel Ellsberg
Enjoying a second act in American politics,
Praising Snowden & Assange,
& Bradley Manning,
I summon up the ghosts of
Julius & Ethel,
Benedict Arnold,
Rose of Tokyo & Mata Hari—
And Ezra exiled at Rapallo,
And John Walker Lindh,
A Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Born in Washington,
District of Columbia,
By way of Afghanistan,
Taliban Americano,
Kangaroo-courted,
Presently residing at the
Federal Correctional Institution
At Terre Haute, Indiana.
Spies.
Traitors.
Saboteurs.
And Poets?
No longer capable of keeping secrets.
Desperate now to tell
The truth.

Look here.  I've been admiring the spectacle  
of Ng’s bare ****. Yes,
this is simply because I have to say
Ng’s bare **** is magnificent.
It’s not a bouncing Botticelli but it’s
a slim, firm bottom, subtly rounded,
real split peach and cream stuff.
And Ng at the other end
is a real nice girl, too!
She's my friend, see?

But back to Ng’s bare ****. Let's stay focused.
I contemplate this vision,
along with the meaning of life,
quite often in broad daylight
with a slash of sunlight across her little buns.
This is more profound than the Tait, the Louvre,
the Met, the Frick, the Neue, the Helly, the Hermitage or even
the Natty Portrait Gallery all bunged in together.
Ng's bare **** is also better, by far,
than anything you'll see at the Bolshoi or La Scala.

I’m amazed at how much I’m amazed by
this work of art. It’s awesome.
And I betcha the most famous galleries would
fall over themselves to display this finest little ****, that is,
if the world wasn't so hung up with hypocrisy and hysteria,
yeah, it'd be heaps more famous than the Mona Lisa.

Mike T Minehan

I like the thin blond hair on the back of your neck
in the light
and the way you touch your lips when you're nervous
(yes I know you don't know you do that)

these 16 years (square root of 256 with a root of 4 8x2)
spinning anxiously excitedly
baby jeep happiest thing independence is sweeeeeet

raindrops are euphoric thank you spring
please bring a storm to shake
my bones

my ****** control
growing ravenously
frick this shoot
I can control my mouth too

Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the **** Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

by,
FRANK O'HARA