He lived in a parlous state of seething frustration. Humanity, as he encountered it, consisted of Sunday drivers, meddlesome neighbors, ditzy relatives, and Harpo Marx, all of them seemingly determined to exasperate him. He would rub his hand over his bald head and across his face in a last effort to control his temper. Then the jackboot would be thrown into the melting pot, and he would explode. He would have recognized the truth of the old Latin proverb, Semper in excremento iaces, solum altitudo variat, had he understood Latin. It means “We’re always in the shit, only the depth varies.”


Howie Good’s most recent poetry collection is Gunmetal Sky, available fromThirty West Publishing.