All Southie kids loved the streets but none more than the project kids. Project kids hated staying in the way rich people hated work. Staying in meant smelling your neighbours’ food through the walls, hearing their fights, their fucks, their toilet flushes, what they listened to on their radios and record players, what they watched TV. Sometimes you’d swear you could smell them, their body odor and cigarette breath and swollen-feet stink.
Dennis Lehane, “Small Mercies”, 2023
She carries the trash can into the living room and sweeps the beer cans into it. Empties the ashtrays from the coffee table and side table and the one she found on top of the TV. It’s there that she catches her reflection in the tube and sees a creature she can’t reconcile with the image she’s clung to in her mind, an image that bears little resemblance to the sweaty lump of matted hair and droopy chin dressed in a tank top and shorts. Even in the flat grey of the picture tube, she can make out the blue veins in her outer thighs, which somehow don’t seem possible, not yet. She’s only forty-two, which, okay, when she was twelve seemed like one foot into the threshold into God’s waiting room, but now, living it, in an age that makes her feel no different than she always has. She’s twelve she’s twenty-one, she’s thirty-three, she’s all the ages at the same time. But she isn’t ageing. Not in her heart. Not in her mind’s eye.
Dennis Lehane, “Small Mercies”, 2023
(Spoof News Services 21July2026: Washington): The United States Postal Services announced today the issuance of a series of stamps “Heroes of the New America”.
The first series of stamps shall depict the ‘Martyrs of January 6” to commemorate the heroic actions of patriots who stormed Sleepy Joe Hollow to rectify “the stolen election”.
All patriots arrested were pardoned and given a pension for their “patriotic actions”.
The next two stamps in the making will celebrate the annexation of Greenland, Canada, Panama, Venezuela and Iran as the newest states of the United States.
‘How pleasant it is to learn that a friend, a man who is bound to one by ties of mutual hospitality, is faring so well. Nevertheless, your outstanding good fortune is not a cause of unconfined joy to me – for I well know that the gods are given to envy. What I wish for myself, and for those I care about – if I may put it like this – is a career that blends good fortune with the occasional stumble. Better to go through life experiencing bad as well as good luck than to know nothing but success. I have never yet known nor heard tell of anyone who enjoyed prosperity so total that he did not ultimately come to a bad end and lose everything that had previously sustained him That being so, I would advise you, in the face of your good fortune, to adopt the following policy. Think hard and identify the object that is most precious to you, the one that would cause you the most heartache to lose – and then throw it away, some place where there is no chance of its ever coming back into human hands.’
Herodotus (b 484 BCE-425 BCE), “The Madness of Cambyses”
The Englishmen hated these foreign invaders with a hatred too deadly for mercy, and as they shot them down they knew their arrows were loaded with vengeance for unutterable deeds of murder and cruelty committed upon defenceless women, little children, and unweaponed men, when these marauding wretches had spread like plague through the land under the banner of King John, bringing ruin, fire, death, and starvation to hundreds of humble homes and peaceful villages.
Henry Gilbert, “Robin Hood”, 1912
COVID’s Health Care Castes
The Untouchables are the unvaccinated
Stay away
Penalize
Trivialize
Criticize
Public health authorities the new KKK
Socially lynching so quietly without killing
Then the One Shotters
Good boys and girls waiting for the second jab
To avoid being a social scab
Then the Two Shotters
Media labelled as wise, intelligent and caring
I’m so fatigued of manipulation and scaring
Not playing the game hammered by incessant and frantic advertising paid for with our tax dollar
and if you protest and holler
You are no better and free than a dog in a collar
Robert K. Stephen
The Incontinence of Kayne West
A man desperately craving attention
Has done it again
This time he has gone Ye Ye all over himself!
Robert K. Stephen
The Good Old Days When the Berlin Wall Was Standing
Being a Party member is a daunting responsibility
Although being truthful the proletarian view us with undeserved hostility
Daring to compare us to a new sort of nobility
What a scheming lack of capitalist civility!
We serve our mighty land and people
Merely a short Zil ride from the Kremlin steeple
We labour day and night in offices even in farthest Georgia
The wonderful land of Comrade Stalin
Just because we have a five room flat off the square
Just illustrates how much for the people we care
Why then your sarcastic stare?
A Zil with a chauffeur
Is provided because I’m no loafer
After all transportation is required to meet with Iraqi foreign minster Mr. Soffer
I am nothing but a hard-working man
So why the snarky comments about my Black Sea tan?
And that expensive Swiss fan
And my suits from France
Well, they are needed for an occasional diplomatic prance
Not for my own personal prestige to enhance
Toiling so busily for the good of the masses we require our own stores
Not because of corrupt mores
That you dare suggest make us rotten to the core
We remain members of the proletarian kind
And your never-ending litany of unfounded accusations are but a figment of a duped mind
To brazenly suggest to a bourgeoise lifestyle we have fell
I respectfully say you can go to Hell
Ask any of our folk
Suggest to them we have unwarranted privileges and they’ll take it as a ill humoured joke
And perhaps deliver a warning poke
We are no different from them
Our happy youth would heartily agree
if not
Do you think I would expel them to a cold Siberian degree
This damn Solzhenitsyn chap has created an awful flap
With his groundless crap
But our censors gave his knuckles a good rap
So he was exiled from our map
Every citizen is free like me
Oh, why can’t you see through the propaganda of the CIA
And for once agree with me?
All we do is administer
And if the skilled like me can be a Politburo minister
What the hell is so sinister?
Robert K. Stephen
Big Bird a Member of Hitler Youth (COVID MEMORIES)
Yes, a cute and a seemingly innocent and loveable character is Big Bird
But seemed recently to choke on a big less than impartial turd
saying on 6November in a Twitter Tweet “get vaccinated and be safe”
On my ass his comments chafe
He will soon be forming a “korps” called “Vaccination Safe”
Turn in your parents and all who fail to buy into vaccination nirvana
Brainwashing children to succumb to the jab
Boom boom boom
You don’t do what we order
You are destined to a deadly doom
Welcome to the brainwashed elite
Goosestepping and acting far less than polite
the walls have ears
careful of those little dears!
Robert K. Stephen
Are We Looking at the End of the World? (COVID MEMORIES)
Contemplating Omicron is the end of it
Personally, I say this is but the beginning of this shit
Just you wait until Ebola morphs into the grand plague
Coming from those poor than poorer African countries it could be said colonizers raped
And just perhaps on YOUR funeral casket their revenge will be draped
You pillage, ignored and plundered
You may be soon felled by their viral thunder!
Robert K. Stephen
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