On This Hill: A Satire on a Bad Neighbor

These lines go out to Larry Ricky "Wrymouth" Calhoun, Professional Bad Neighbor.

Upon this land I'll take my stand,

It's on this hill I'll die:

If any man sells out this land

It's certainly not I.

You had no right to buy land here;

I could have blocked the sale;

I trusted elders I held dear;

I've seen their judgment fail.

You fancied, in your twisted mind,

You'd run my family off;

Now you've been caught, it seems, you find

How at such threats we scoff.

And now you think you'll sell the land?

Pray tell us, Coz, to whom?

Inflated prices we'll not stand;

You've dug yourself a tomb.

Here's how you now may sell the land::

To its own rightful heirs,

One cent per acre, cash in hand,

Is what the market bears. 

The buyer of land you have spoiled

You will then compensate,

Paying for each month it's defiled

By trace of glyphosate.

And all the damage you have wrought

To motivate a sale,

You'll pay to put back as it ought

To be, and without fail.

A thousand miles away you'll stay,

A thousand miles or more,

Or else for your crimes you will pay

Behind a soundproofed door.

There was a time when some believed

You fit to dwell among

My closer kin. They were deceived.

The judgment bell has rung.

Some thought you were the clever one--

Oh, that was long ago!

We call checkmate. The game is done.

Thank us who let you go.

-------

For those who came in late: For more than thirty years, the peaceful neighborhood--it really was like a religious community--in which I grew up has been plagued by petty harassment and sabotage. Mostly it's been cheap, stupid, childish pranks, things that could be blamed on children or animals if the same prank hadn't been repeated for as long as people kept replacing the missing bolt or broken pipe. But more recently it's escalated to theft and property damage, the kind of torture of animals this Administration has made a federal offense, and intentional poisoning of human beings with substantial overuse of the chemical sprays our Bad Neighbor promised never to use. 

For years nobody was willing to consider a competent adult as being our neighborhood nuisance. For years I've played both nightwatchman and detective, and collected evidence that my third cousin, "Wrymouth" Calhoun, has intentionally harassed neighbors, turned us against each other, stolen our property, tortured and killed our animals, and done us bodily harm, with the intention of "running us off" and buying our land cheap--as he did once before in Tennessee.

I was brought another garbled, incoherent report of further threats on Thursday morning, Wrymouth, and frankly I am tired. Do you really think that, if anything happens to me or my house or my cats, you'll walk? I understand your feeling unhappy about having lost so much time and money on this sociopathic scheme, but the question really is whether you want to sell the land to me, on my terms, or lose the right to sell it at all.

A lot of people are on to you now, Wrymouth. We have photos. We have fingerprints. We can get medical data. We have no sympathy for you whatsoever. Any of us could easily block any attempt on your part to get any profit out of your evildoing. Your venture into real estate speculation in my neighborhood is going to cost you at least a lot of money.

So at midnight, still playing nightwatchman since the nasty tricks have continued and some people can't choose their work shifts, I clicked over to Poets & Storytellers United and saw an invitation to write poems about some point on which we are "a little bit stubborn."

I'm a lot stubborn, Wrymouth. I am my father's daughter. And I serve my father's God. Whose names are The Compassionate and The Merciful One--even toward you!--but in your case compassion and mercy mean giving you an opportunity to repent and make restitution.

So...the verses above are not a poem. They are not pretty or funny or nice. They are an English doggerel version of an Irish Satire, a verse form intended not to give anyone pleasure but, in the old figure of speech, to raise boils on someone's face. (If an ordinary insult made someone blush, a satire raised boils.) I don't know whether the other kind, gentle, and witty baby-boomers at P&SU even want this poem  in their link-up. Well, they're nice, but they're tough; the prompt comes from a cancer survivor who often proposes topics related to pain and death. So they can probably stand this. Local lurkers need to see it, anyway. It's not pretty but it is true.