Just Doing My Job

Obituary Flack

R. Sargent Shriver, that one was mine. 

Jack LaLanne, Karl Malden, George McGovern, Jerry Falwell,

mine, mine, mine and mine. 

I hate to brag but I had a hand

in Molly Ivins.  You’ll find my fingerprints

all over Robert McNamara,

a puddle of superlatives

from wading into  

John Updike and Pete Postlethwaite.

Up to my neck in Liz Taylor, perhaps

in over my head with Ferlin Husky,

but it was with great glee

I gilded the lily of Madame Nhu,

said it with roses when Max Roach

ceased to beat

the skins,

waved Harman Killebrew

in from third, his last home run

before pushing up daisies

in deep left center. 

Levon Helm

practically wrote itself,

the honor all mine,

leaning in to lay on a harmony for

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

A stake through the heart of John Demjanjuk,

my foot to the floor going into the turn

with Carroll Shelby, Ferdinand A. Porsche

urging us on from the backseat

in clipped no nonsense German. 

Maurice Sendak, 

my deadline met through tears

and terrible roars and terrible gnashing teeth.  

A job I would have done for free

until they let me go

then hired me back

at half the pay,

my share toward the cost

of wafer thin benefits   

tripled, cankerous

corporate policy set forth in this couplet:

Down to two meals a day, who needs a third?

Plump shareholders bray, too stuffed for words.

Lunch is over.

Fifteen minutes flies

faster than Neil Armstrong (mine).

To improve productivity, I’ve been assigned

to write everyone’s

in advance beginning with the A’s. 

Right now I’m working on yours,

driving home the final rivets

in some standard boilerplate,

composing the final flat line

in a fibrillating

half-hearted Hallmark hatchet job.