An Open Letter to Really Important People
                     The Old Dime Box, Texas Statement
           A Manifesto Made Manifest in Manifesting Manifestingness

We post this serious looking document
Bloated with long vocabulary words
Sodden with weak dependent clauses
Marshaled in numbered ranks, down, down they go

To the GossipNet all serious like
And everyone has to pay attention to us
Because it’s AN OPEN LETTER, y’know -
You may sign it if you’ve got letters behind your name

Signatories:

Apostle-Disciple Magic Dawn, DD., Non-Binary, Author of Green Polar Bears I Am, Co-Equal-Director of the Anti-Oppressionist Theatre Against the Occupation, Agent of the Revolution, Auteur, Guest on The Wheel of Fortune and Parent of Two AMAZING children of indeterminate Gender with Their AWESOME and AMAZING Life-Partner Sven-Marie.

Massive Ferguson, M.Ed., Poet, Rector of Admissions, The University of Where the Old Circuit City Use to Be

Poncy Tworbst, M.A., PUBLISHED Author, Seeker, Inspirational Singer-Songwriter, PUBLISHED

Heather-Mistee La’ Thwitte-Tworbst, Ph.D., Director of Library Resources at Saint Margaret ****** Homeschool Resource Authority Collective, Inc., Certified Ordained Consecrated Priest in The Worldwide Church of Me-ness and Pastor of the World-Famous Weddings ‘R’ Us Chapel of Rainbow Dreams in Magdalena, New Mexico

Lawrence Hall, HSG, Thinker of Thinky-Ness and, Like, Stuff, Endowed Chair he found at Goodwill, His Mark: X

(Sean Ian Johann Johnson, MBA, J.D., Chief Photocopier Operator at Donald Trump University and Fashion Editor at Gun, God, and Guts Magazine, was not able to sign today; he is sharing a cell with other White House staff and patiently awaiting The Day of Greatness.)

We can have our Pushkin, all thinky and sad
And our poker-playing pups, cheating at cards
Ruslan and Ludmylla dancing on ice
At the Houston Airport Holiday Inn

Did Pushkin paint the poker-playing pups
Or carve tetrameters while in his cups?
That green baize poker table, a samovar
And the Big Giant Head, who needs an ace

We can have our Pushkin, all thinky and sad
And too those kitschy dogs, being real bad!

Alexander Pushkin and the Poker-Playing Dogs

We can have our Pushkin, all thinky and sad
And our poker-playing pups, cheating at cards
Ruslan and Ludmylla dancing on ice
At the Houston airport Holiday Inn

Did Pushkin paint the poker-playing pups
Or carve tetrameters while in his cups?
That green baize poker table, a samovar
And the Big Giant Head, who needs an ace

We can have our Pushkin, all thinky and sad
And too those kitschy dogs, being real bad!

what to do.
where to go.
how to

get
there.

icy whitened teeth gleam earthy chartreuse canine slant glyph
is, really,
the only possession that

i have
on my person,
in my backpack.

---- well, err that, and
this flat slab of lit stone,
thought up by small gods,
and made by smaller people that live in
far far away binary lands that eat the sky
with rolling saturated ebony clouds,
which help smelt those inner beings of light,
and force them inside these tablets -
which I, then, use
to inscribe my

scream-of-conscience
wrought into thinky pixel arc
across the once blank page.

all is not well. sure. i get that.
but the visible spectrum
still bows forth colorings
in the hurt skies above,
over metro rush and mirth cursed.

but we still
can rewrite it.

this
is
why
i sit.

alone.

this monkish
quietude
i exist in:

living room consumed.
it's where, under a relatively nice high ceiling,
i do my

pirouettes,
yogic forays,
and taekwondo kicks

on the apt. faux hardwood floor; or

i am laid out in unmade bed
with a small boring hole 10 microns across,
drilling into my slurring skull -once removed-
it's lonely dome
grasped by two trusty amputated hands
of mine. my two floating seers roam free,
searching out a truer scene.

i mean, what im trying to say is:

the road
calls
me;

long languid abyss strip cruising
blurring lights through
spaceytime-ish. it's silly,

really, how i always
get ants inside my bones. home is not
a concept i know; nor wish to.

i have
resting glitch
syndrome.

new glyphs always are calling me,
like **** Sirens licking my every sense,
filling all my holes with fallen lily petals.

come
save me,
my poet.

ride me
into your
own. fix me into
your hip bones, protruding
toward it.

be
mine.
mover
too.
us
pushpulling
flux.

this is how the imagination is made:

your tiny origami world gets torn;
then, yer mememe death comes by way of small paper cuts;
from the periphery of this rip, you swim upstream, again,
till you see the fēniks wing glinting like a finger ring careening off the sun.

hmm's and err's now populate yer thinky time
like never before, here in Cleverly Folded Paper World.

t h e r e you are;
mmm, you feel the feels even more,
and the refresh bubbles up from the torn.

but still the big cut creeps back ---
x out old you; new document, anew anew, stares, blinking, waiting.

edits forever bloom steely wutabtme? iridium spiels around edges
of tattooed white petals, elegant writs fell; wilting; seeding...

this world, too, must be cut to fit:
if you wish to have a home for the iNGkē worm
that sillily dreams of one day winning its wings.

Hey you with your thinky pain,
your existential crises,
your broken bleeding heart beating in vain.
Hey you!
I say, hey!

Stop being a ****.

close your eyes

right
now.

space
the **** out.

watch and

wait

for those
****** thoughts
to surface. and when they do,
describe them.

give them crazy long fangs.
give them a mane made of fury.
let them summon that buried hatchet.

let it
do its
worst.

then
watch that ****
dissipate
into the forest
of thinky thoughts.

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About Clever Us, the Magazine of Poetry and Thinky-ness

We print free verse about revolution
And deconstructing colonialism
The power and urgency of the story
Post-masculine dystopia redeemed

Visit our online submission system
Against the occupation resistance
As activist performance artisans
Who shape our unconventions for ourselves

Fists of ink against oppressionism
And that is why we track your usage

cleanse the doors of perception
and you still get cleansed perceptual doors;
sure, it's a higher, more complex order of doors,
but it's still a door.
it still opens and shuts.
it still reveals and conceals rooms,
one door at a time.

the subject always objects
in the house of many doors.
it pictures. it members. each one,
a massive concatenation of rooms framed.
but the rooms always shift
with each new door opened,
because we always

think.
imagine.
wonder.

and we
re-member.

remembrance is always novel:
the old, new'd
with visions truer, because broader in space.

thinky stick binoculars can never be put down
in the house of doors and rooms reimagined.

i am extremely aware of who i am
yet i am so terribly lost...
i cannot put it into words, its subtlety.
i cannot put it into thoughts, its sublimity.
every breath, every click, every tap, every blink
pushing me to the brink
and my ears are on fire and i can only seethe
while i try, i try to slowly (slowly) breathe.

i am extremely aware of who i am
yet i have no idea!
i cannot stop their glares, their whispers.
i cannot reach that hope that glimmers
in the eyes of those who don't feel this way
who don't have a million (million) things to say
who go by their days, a bad one once in a while...
who maybe 2 or 3 times have had to fake a smile
and i'm thinking all these... thinky things and breathing,
and i am so terribly lost.

Scorn not the printed word, O thoughtful soul,
As Wordsworth 1 did not say, and do not set
An electric machine to grind through files
In search of gobbets all thinky and stuff

For Shakespeare set in iambs clean and neat
All the transcendent ideas of the good,
The beautiful, and the eternal true
Sustained in meters of steel and words of gold



Shakespeare never

               wobbled
                                                all over the paper in unmetered *******
lines
of disconnected babble about stars and selves 2 without any citations for verification
                                       stirred around in a sort of it-sounds-like-Shakespeare-kinda-sorta-they-won’t-care-anyway soup to be copied and pasted onto sheets of 8 1/2” by 11” fake parchment woodpulp because, like, y’know, that’s what you do for graduation ceremonies



1 Wordsworth, “Scorn not the Sonnet”
2 Possibly a misremembering of Cassius' words to Brutus in Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”  If so, the quotation has been, like Caesar, assassinated.

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                Happy Roman New Year - Join me for a Cuppa


                                   I went, and I am still going.

                                       -Yevgeny Yevtushenko
                                             “Zima Junction”


The dogs and I are out on our morning patrol
Greeting the new day, new month, and new year
Greeting the sun as he sings through woods
His song of Creation, Creation-fresh

I have fed the animals, lit the fire
Made coffee to enjoy at my old desk
With Edmondson, Wells, and their pal Shakespeare
And John Senior with his awfully thinky words

Fresh coffee, fresh words for me and for you –
Join me, won’t you, for a merry cup of brew!



I have no connection with the authors or publishers; I simply recommend them to you:

Edmondson, Paul and Wells. All the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020

Senior, John. Pale Horse, Easy Rider. Lawrence, Kansas, Shakespeherian Rag Press, 1992