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Those who have never bagged corpses
After a night of flarelit horror
Confused, concussed, their souls awash
With blood and smeary shards of flesh

Those who have never smelt the night
Incensed in the obscene stench of death
Where screaming conscripts’ lives were ripped
Are calling for armed revolution

Let us call instead for a cigar
And a quiet evening with Keats
Your ‘umble scrivener’s site is:
Reactionarydrivel.blogspot.com.
It’s not at all reactionary, tho’ it might be drivel.


Lawrence Hall’s vanity publications are available on amazon.com as Kindle and on bits of dead tree:  The Road to Magdalena, Paleo-Hippies at Work and Play, Lady with a Dead Turtle, Don’t Forget Your Shoes and Grapes, Coffee and a Dead Alligator to Go, and Dispatches from the Colonial Office.
I’ll give you everything if I think you’re the one
But once I am through with you I promise I’m done
 Jan 2019 ConnectHook
Homunculus
In a distant dystopia, it towers above all.
It radiates a dim blue glow, that
Transfixes eyes and minds alike.
Pulling with the gravity of 20,000 suns,
Its force cannot be rivaled.
An irresistible, iridescent abomination, and
An admonition unto the autonomy of thought.
Weaving tapestries of illusory illustrations,
Into the indigent intellect of its unsuspecticng viewers.
It's images penetrate the psyche like magic, as
Minds are manipulated into the madness, of
Mass consumption of manufactured "needs."
Its reporters replace reason with rhetoric, for
Objectivity is no obeject in an age of sound bites.
It demonizes difference, distracts, and desensitizes.
Apathy becomes queen, and facile pleasures become king.

Remember your vigilance.
This is part 1, part 2 will be a companion piece (or counterpoint, perhaps) called "The Virtuous Page"
 Jan 2019 ConnectHook
Homunculus
As the hour draws late,
      all the tribes gather,
The band begins to play, and
      in the midst of their serene
Exchange of musical phrases,
      I meet a quite peculiar man.
His dreadlocks hang way
      down past his shoulders, and
Above his rope sandals and
      patchwork pants, he sports
A shirt, emblazoned with
      a portrait of Lord Ganesha
Seated serenely in Lotus posture,
      overlaid by a wire wrap necklace
With a large piece of opal in the center.

His pupils are the size of
       dinner plates, nearly
Eclipsing the irises of his eyes.
       his musk is a distinctive mixture of
Body odor, *** smoke, and strong incense.
       we exchange our salutary pleasantries, and
As I absorb the spectacle of his appearance,
      he begins to discourse, saying:

"I charge my crystals
    in the moonlight, and
Keep them close by day,
   they clear my chi blockages, and
Realign my chakras,
   I burn sage and patchouli
To invoke the goddess
   spirit of the forest moon,
We are all just cosmic vibration
   expressed as living matter in
The timeless unity of
  the flowering astral plane"

He pauses for a moment,
     to light his spliff, and
After a few large tokes, continues on,
     describing the events of one fateful night,
When he "sat for a long spell, and
      experienced an unbridled quiescence of
Meditative stillness, culminating in a
      stream of flowing fractal visions, and a
      Whirlwind of
                             Pulsating
                                  Kundalini
                                       Energy

I listen with a sort of
   detached amusement, but
My brain is filtering his words out, and
    all I can hear are bursts of Charlie Brown's
Parents from the old Peanuts cartoon
    Interpolated with sentence fragments
That all seem to say the same thing:

"Look at me, I am so spiritual
  I am so profound I am so wise
I know the Truth I am enlightened"
"mwah Mwah mwah Mwah mwah
Mwah mwah Mwah mwah Mwah"

and then, suddenly, this haze of
  pseudo profound spirit science is
Interrupted by a phrase that grabs my
  attention, with strange immediacy.
"Also, I've got some fire doses. 5 a hit."

"Oh yeah?" I say. "ME, TOO, and
"I know mine are better, best on lot!"
He seems taken aback, as if offended.
He says he'll Pepsi challenge mine, and
That I'll be proven wrong. I accept.

He then pulls out  
a shiny vial of
Lucy in the Sky, and
Without hesitation,
squirts a generous
Puddle of it onto my tongue.

"Alright" he says "your turn."
I reach into my pocket,
Produce a small vial, and
Reciprocate his action.
"Now, we'll see!" He says
to me, with an air of smugness.
"That, we will" I retort.

We talk a bit longer, and
I look down at my watch.
"I must be off!" I say
"It's time for the show!"

We exchange our goodbyes, and
I wander off into the night,
Feeling rather odd,
He thinks he's bested me, but
I laugh quietly to myself,
Knowing in my mind,
That my vial was just eye drops, and
He just gave me nearly 10 hits for free, and
All for the sake of inflating the ego
He supposedly didn't have,

and you know...

I never saw him again after that.
This satirical ode is targeted at a very specific type of person. Some of my friends are what you might call "hippies"; and within the various circles associated with that subculture, you almost inevitably encounter the self styled guru, spouting off loads of pseudo-profound hogwash, using buzzwords from cultures and traditions he doesn't really understand, and effectively cheapening and undermining them in a vain attempt to make himself seem enlightened (probably to try and get laid). What's worse is that almost just as certainly will you find someone, perhaps even a group, who hangs on to his every word. These types are especially common at big music festivals.
We shall make
A recourse to the gun,
If for election we run
Devoid of ideas,
Sell which we can,
We could hardly win
The heart of a single fan.

Also labelled
"Corrupts,atavists
And narrow nationalists"
They can
Put on us a ban
So that sinks on us
The Sun.

Climbing into
A political ivory tower
Is not for us,
Let us beat
The drum of war
To garner
And to monger to power.
.
recalcitrant, retrogressive, detractors,mongers,war
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