Kicking Around the Dane's Head With Donal Mahoney

Back in the Seventies, Donal Mahoney, then editor of a magazine, hired an art director from Pakistan, a man who had worked in the U.S. embassy in Karachi for 15 years. Back then, there was no turbulence between Islam and the West. Mahoney and the art director, culturally as different as night and day but with a similar work ethic, put out a monthly magazine together for 10 years. Mahoney wishes now, almost 40 years later, he had the gonads to call his old friend and ask him what’s going on with ISIS. But Mahoney doesn’t know whether he could believe him. He’s also worried because ISIS no longer figures prominently in our media as we watch Hillary, Bernie and Trump duel for the spoils of November. But planes continue to fall out of the sky and one wonders when the next incident like the one in Paris will occur. Many were shot to death in restaurant in Tel Aviv last night simply for being Jewish. So Mahoney worries not so much about ISIS, per se, but about every branch of radical Islam. Boko Haram is still a menace and Al Qaeda has not gone away. He has compassion for the refugees but does not think our government has the ability to sort the good from the bad when allowing them to come here. It only takes one dreaming of Paradise and the prize of 77 virgins that awaits him after he blows himself up, maybe at a ball game somewhere in the Midwest or in a subway tunnel in New York. 


World Cup

The ISIS Brit
tall in the desert

blade by his side
talks to the camera

severs the head 
of the orange infidel

kneeling beside him 
kicks the head

across the sand
while the world 

has a beer
in its coliseum

deaf to Satan
shouting “Goal!”


Donal Mahoney


An ISIS Nursery Rhyme

Listen, young lady,
this is the man 

who will cut off your legs
and this is the man 

who will cut off your arms
and this is the man

who will cut off your head
if you fail to tell us where  

your parents hid the gold.
Had we known about the gold,

they’d be here, not over there
in chunks, baking in the sun.

Donal Mahoney


Character Flaw

Millie wants Willie to make up,
go back to the way they were,
be lovey-dovey, hunky-dory.
Willie wishes he could 

but that’s not the way he is.
He has a character flaw,
permanent as a birthmark
his mother told him 

when he was only six.
Some folks can forgive 
and then forget but that’s 
not you Willie, she said.

When he heard about 
the crucifixions in Syria,
he said that's genocide, 
plain and simple. 

Willie’s can't forget 
a wrong, big or small.
It’s hard to forgive, he says,
never mind forget ISIS.

You’re not ISIS, Willie,
his Millie reassures him.
You just have a conscience.
No nails, no hammer.