An honorable man,
pillar of his community,
you know all the cliches,
I need not repeat them,
so when he fell, he crashed.
They turned him out
of the office he had worked
so hard for, unhung his plaques,
defiled his files, including
the one marked PERSONAL, clippings and all.
He denied everything,
right up to the signing
of the consent decree, his name,
his story, worst of all his face,
all over the papers the next day.
And that was it,
his life locked behind him
as tightly, as silently as per-
manently as the stainless steel
vault of a failed bank on closing day.
“Fallen” is part of an unpublished collection — Business Blues — by Honigfeld, a Princeton resident who spent most of his professional career directing clinical research programs at a large pharmaceuticals company. He has taught at Mercer Community College, where weekly writing assignments are universally dreaded by his students.
