Ted Lowry

Lucy Loomis

Thanks to Russell Streur, Camel Saloon Barkeep, the Supervisor of Records for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts forced Sturgis Library to hand over all documents with my regard last week.  After reading the documents, I noted the absence of the reason for Director Lucy Loomis' decision to permanently trespass me from Sturgis Library without warning or possibility of due process.  The reason, of course, was the written criticism I'd disseminated one week before regarding library policy on censorship and openness to all points of view and Loomis' egregious hypocrisy regarding that policy.  On the same note, Global Free Press just published an article I wrote regarding the local press' refusal to publish anything about that permanent trespass decree: http://www.globalfreepress.org/editorials/topics/free-press/3427-dereliction-of-duty-journalists-without-journalistic-principles.

The recently acquired documents inspired the following poem.

 

Beware of Marm

With pleasure I will torpedo the ark.

—Henrik Ibsen, “An Enemy of the People”

The ploy was not ingenious, but rather sadly typical of the day,

convenient and diversionary—no counter argument necessary,
just demonize the messenger and ignore what he had to say.

And so on the basis of a single event of cops called and

suddenly confronting me in the public library that day in June,

when I was working in a room alone and quietly,

the Marm in Chief,* who’d invited them, would later write

to the trustees who’d hired her:

Because of his behavior when the police were here they almost

                                                                                                  arrested him.

So now I had an almost-arrested police record, and almost appeared

in the almost-arrested blotter of the local newspaper. 

He can go from calm to extremely agitated in a matter of seconds,

she’d written clinically, though without PhD.

Yet who in their right mind not on meds would not have raised

his voice viscerally

at such a grotesque affront to freedom of speech and expression?

So this is the correct decision for the safety of the staff and public,”

she decided as judge, jury, and henchbitch. 

And out I walked that miserable day in June, three cops by my side,

imminent danger to staff and public safety, though no gun

and bullets in hand, no jihadist bomb belt round the gut,

not even hatred in my eyes, just a pen, paper, and laptop computer.

If he does come into the library, the police have advised us not to

interact with him but simply call them and they will come and arrest him,

she noted, proud of her successful orchestration.

But to the Marm in Chief’s likely dismay, I’ve yet to set foot in her library

since that notorious decree to permanently trespass me,

and so no life sentence in some harsh penitentiary up till now for me! 

…………………………………………………………….

*The Marm in Chief is Director Lucy Loomis, Sturgis Library, Barnstable, MA.  Thanks to Citizen Russell Streur’s perseverance and the resultant positive decision made by the Secretary of Records for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, nine months after that dismal day in June, I was able to view the document containing the Marm in Chief’s above statement.