-Freddy Requiem-

Across the street from

Ruggles Park —

Across the street where

Trees go to die —

The Ruggles School stands solidly

Like a brick shit-house,

A sort-of Damocles sword
Positioned over the heads
Of adjudicated public school classroom nuisances.

Fatso Freddy DeGata,

Guilty of a rule-breaking vendetta,

Did time at Ruggles School

Under the harsh thumb of his father,

The principal and chief enforcer there.

You have to hand it to Freddy,

Guts enough for the rest of us

When threatened

With hard-time at Ruggles.

His old-man took him in,

Slapped the fear of god into his head

And with the lobotomy in place

Freddy came back to us in a month or so,

Plump and docile as a tomato hornworm.

Freddy’s remembered for his swift

Retributions to school tattletales,—

For the straight-line flatness

Of the back of his head, vertically plumbed
To the plane of his neck and because he breathed heavily

From his nose and his mouth at the same time.

the Fall River Public Schools, 1953, 1956(?)