Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                  National Public Radio on Saturday Morning
                  While Driving to the Dump in an Old Pickup
                  Whose Radio Receives Only Two Stations

Wait, wait; don’t bore me

(knowing chortles and polite applause)

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Except for the title none of this is mine; the direct quotation following is from Shakespeare:

                                              Jill Macbeth

…Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s *******,
And take my milk for gall, your murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry, “Hold, hold!”

                                         -Macbeth I.v.41-62

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Macbeth, by William Shakespeare

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                            Monsoon Coffee

The old men argue whether we have monsoons
Or if our afternoon thunderstorms are unworthy
Of scientific labels, notations, or marks
To be discussed on the six o’clock news

Each day at four I take my coffee outside
To sit beneath the oak and take the air
With a book, the Wordle, or an empty mind
As thunderheads rise like monsters in the east

Fearsome clouds menace the sky-paling moon
And breezes wind themselves up for the daily monsoon

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                         ­  Double Haters

                            The windiest militant trash
                            Important Persons shout

                      -W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”

No
I am not a double hater
I am a single writer
Since both parties chose to crater
I refuse to choose either blighter
They offer us only Stink and Stank
So I will leave my ballot blank

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

               You Are Not Something Burnt into the **** of a Cow

So many people want to be brands
I hope you are not a brand
I want to read your words, not your brands
You are a poet
You are not a label on a tin of tomatoes
Or something burnt into the **** of a cow

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                      The Percolation of Our Beautiful Green Earth

Like MeeMaw’s aluminum coffee ***
The earth percolates through all the seasons
Of rain and drought and freeze, of dust and mud
The ground we work gives up its annual troves

The tiller’s tines turn up old pocketknives
Old nails, old screws, old bits of window glass
An unfired flash cube from a party long ago
Gardening is also archaeology

I excavate from the machine while sitting in the shade
Decades-old fence wire wrapped around the blade

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…!

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                            Waiting-Room Art:
      Same Old Bicycle Leaning Against the Same Old Sunlit Wall

We’ve all seen that bicycle, that sunlit wall
In photographs taken in Italy
And Austin (don’t forget the bike-lock now)
In paintings from old-lady art classes everywhere

Perhaps that bike and wall are a Statement
About Milieu and Patina and, like, stuff
Neoformalist New Socialist Realism
Inverted kitsch deflating the patriarchy

I propose a fresh vision: what I would like
Is that old wall crumbling, and crushing that bike