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

                          Putting All the Hearts Back Together

A child who takes a clock apart to see
Just how it works can easily be forgiven

Someone who takes a heart apart to see
Just how that works is justly unforgiven

Graduation Speech Soup

The key that unlocks the road to the future
Blazing a trail for a torch that lights the way
For memories that will be treasured forever -
Oh, the places you will go – like Wal-Mart

There has never been a class just like you
Not since last year, anyway, so go forth
And more filler about memories goes here
You are the future, just like every class

Blah-blah, blah-blah, blah-blah, blah-blah, blah-blah

And now as you go your separate ways
Please just forget this catalogue of cliches’

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                A Deer and I Surprised Each Other

Silence
We paused
We looked
She leaped

I said
Goodbye
But she
Was gone

And I
Was left
There all
Alone!

15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

We are scattered, like the Tribes of Israel
Sown not in rejection but as word and work
Planted everywhere, and commanded to grow
In the rich earth of divine Creation

There is no veto in birds, rocks, or thorns
Let them instead serve in their own poor ways
As dutiful as humans, maybe more so
Unfallen either as seed or as beings

To tend and guard the ancient unities
That grow forever in Jerusalem

Never Trust a Guy Who Irons His Jeans

Strong canvas is the stuff of adventure
Like a cowboy lassoing horses wild
It captures the ocean’s galloping winds
And to even wilder ships harnesses them

Strong canvas is the stuff of manly work
Defense against fierce cactus and desert dust
Loops for the hammer, pouches for the nails
Sacred vestments anointed with sweat and dirt

A good man works hard, and says what he means
But never trust a guy who irons his jeans

After Epiphany 2

The stripping of the tree is almost Lenten
The ornaments gone, only “bare ruined choirs”
Remain, no comfort of carols or hymns
As it is dragged outside into the cold

It almost seems to shiver in the winter sun
Reduced to poverty and then to scraps
Which in the months to come enkindle then
An evening fire after the cows are milked

But not celebrated with festive lights
The stripping of the tree is almost Lenten

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Macbeth, Doctor Zhivago, Captain Call, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Allen Ginsberg, and Rod McKuen Visit the Dentist but Have to Wait for Beowulf's Root Canal

         In gratitude for all the wonderful dentists, hygienists, and
                       technicians who keep us chewing!


                                  Macbeth Visits the Dentist

Is this a drill which I see before me
The whirring drill outstretched to my teeth
O happiest gas! Come let me clutch thee!
Before my body I throw my dental shield


                            Dr. Zhivago Visits the Dentist

Poor dental hygiene is for crowds of mediocrities
Only individuals seek dentistry
And they shun those who tolerate bad teeth
How many things in the world deserve our loyalty?

A dentist whose papers are in order


                            Captain Call Visits the Dentist

Call saw that the dentist was looking at him
The nitrous oxide drained out of him
Leaving him feeling tired
“I hate a bad tooth. I won’t tolerate it.”


                 Yevgeny Yevtushenko Visits the Dentist

For a tooth to come out
Some of the pain must be devoted to Stalin
Soviet dentistry demanded happy endings
I knew I could floss and brush better than Mayakovsky
Bella’s teeth were second only to those of Akhmatova
Only I could make Babi Yar all about me and my teeth
When I saw a dentist in Zima Junction
I saw the truth of the Revolution in her little mirror


                     Allen Ginsberg Visits the Dentist

I saw the best teeth of my generation destroyed by sugared sodas and a failure to brush and floss

dragging themselves through the medical complex at dawn looking for a fix

thinning-hair old hipsters burning for relief from aching jaws at the healing hands of dedicated professionals among their shining instruments

dedicated professionals who did not drop out of the University of Arkansas and never saw Mohammedan angels among the rooftops


                                   Rod McKuen Visits the Dentist

I am like a molar; I have chewed alone
Gnawed a hundred hamburgers
Never found a bone
Still and all I’m toothy
Reason is you see
Once in a while along the way
Dentists have been good to me.

20 September 1870

Like vultures hovering over the faithful dead
The rank red rags of base repression hung
Upon the blast-breeched walls of captive Rome;
The smoke of conquest fouled the ancient streets
While mocking conquerors marched their betters
At the point of enlightened bayonets
To the scientific future, murdering those
Who bore themselves with quiet dignity.

False, sinister Savoy sneered in disdain
At ancient truths, this costumed reprobate
Who played at soldier once the firing ceased,
And claimed Saint Peter’s patrimony on
The corpses of the merely useful who
With today’s slogans fresh upon their lips
At dawn advanced upon the remnant walls
So thinly held by the last legionaries

And thus befeathered fat Vittorio
Was given his victory by better men
On both sides there, their corpses looted by
The pallid inheritors of Progress.
The son of a Sardinian spurred his horse
Along the streets to take enforced salutes,
And to the Quirinal by a passage broad,
And finally to the Ardeatine Caves.

for Crazy Diamond Kristy, who makes life fun...

One exclamation mark is right and proper
Add any more, and your thought comes a cropper!

:)

Cheers!

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                 On Reading a Poem by Du Mu

Everything is far away
China is ever so far away
The dynasties are far away
A golden dragon might fly us there

The moon is across the river
The blue-black river in the mist
A fishing boat is tied to the gate
The water-gate of our inn

What do they mean, the moon and boat?
Maybe the moon and the boat mean nothing
They simply are; they are themselves
Or perhaps we mean the moon and boat

Because of Du Mu and his words
The moon and the boat are forever
The blue-black river is forever
In reading of them so are we



“A Night at the Inn While Travelling”
Three Hundred Tang Poems
Translated by Peter Harris
London: Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2009

I am so Boring That…

Morpheus takes my correspondence course
I teach the House of Lords how to induce snores
I make strong men yawn with my tired metaphors
I am on retainer with all the best sleep clinics

I am the reason the grooms in Macbeth slept
Hypnos and Nix envy me and my skills
Rip Van Winkle was wonked out by my rhymes
My verses make for Odin’s yearly sleep

I wield my Sword of Soporificity
And the condemned oversleep their executions

Look upon my cliches’, ye mighty, and despair, hahahahahaha…!

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

502 Bad Gateway
____________
nginx/1.1.19

Dear Friends,

This has been fun, but with the late changes I can make nothing of the HelloPoetry site.  If I can manage to submit this, please know that you can continue to read my scribblings on my own poorly-accomplished – but functional – site, Reactionary Drivel at reactionarydrivel.blogspot.com.  It’s not really reactionary, tho’ it’s often drivel!  And if you will send me the name of your site, I will follow you there.

Cheers,

Lawrence


Good-bye, Poetry?

Oh, Eliot, what has happened to your wonderful site
Your gift of poetry to a suffering world?
Did some Morlock in an unhappy hour
Break into spring to make it winter again?

Who has torn and scattered the pages
And thus obscured the words so carefully shaped
By the fugitive keepers of dreams
Who seek for them again in the wilderness?

There once was a workshop for poor scribblers –
A studio of dreams – may it be restored!



Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Cat

for Calvin

Yes, surely there will be another cat
But not this Cat, not this Big Orange Dust-Mop
Lounging “with abs of steel and *** appeal”
At his window, hungry for hummingbirds

Or lurking there behind that door to swat
His Sarah, who served as his household staff,
For failing to render due obeisance
To him, the superior MagnifiCat

Dear Calvin –

For now, farewell, until that better World,
O happy, leaping, loving childhood friend

This past year's scribblings can be found (maybe - Google improved their Blogger so much that it doesn't format) at:

https://poeticdrivel.blogspot.com/

20 September 2020 - Google "updated" (cough) their Blogger to the point where it no longer works, so I am back here until this fails again.

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

                                        The War on Books

          The war on books, codified by Stalin’s functionaries
          at the Soviet Writers’ Conference in 1934 and ruthlessly
          waged by the secret police for the following fifty years,
          was finally coming to an end, and Zhivago’s insurgent
          guerrillas were winning.

                             -Duncan White, Cold Warriors:
                    Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold war

What books will America purge this week -
What childhood adventures, what scholarly works
What entertainments of an idle hour
Will be forbidden to us in this Land of the Free?

We pray that nations blessed with liberty
Will smuggle books to us, stories and poems
With innocent ideas that give delight
And in their innocence threaten tyrants

What books will America purge this week –
And when did we become afraid of ideas?

Leafy Labor Day and Summer’s Last Dragon*

In a happier world, children this day,
Barefoot children, running about in play
Would pause now at the end of summer time -
New school supplies from the old five-and-dime

Write those first smudgy lines with a new ink-pen
For tomorrow the new school year takes in
And count their cedar pencils, one, two, three
Then out again to the Robin Hood tree

A wooden sword, and a dragon to slay
In a happier world, children this day

(Their Robin Hood wants to slay a dragon,
and so a wrathful dragon slain shall be;
Little children know best about these things)

“I can buy a clock, sir!”

-Will Roper, obtuse as usual, to Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons

Some vague authority for this and that
Advises us that now is the time for all
Good men to come to the aid of their clockery
And set each loyal clock an hour back

For after all, the old times were much better
When an American-made watch or clock
Required a good, strong man to wind it up –
None o’ yer godless Chinese ‘tronics, eh

And as the seasonal will must have it so
Upon our rounds to each house clock we go!

We lay our coats down at the feet of Saul,
And stones we hurl, curses and stones:
                                                                ­       libtard,
     Fascist, snowflake, reactionary, slime
     ******, demoncrat, shrillary, trumptard,

     Republicrap, boomer, millennial,
     ******, *****, alt-right, leftie, scumbag,
     Crayon-people, *****, tape-worm, muppet, dweeb,
     Sock-puppet, Russkie, ****, trash, and creep

And thus we deny the Cornerstone when
We lay our coats down at the feet of Saul

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


                            The Presentation of the Rodent

          “The Feast of Candlemas…is perhaps the most
            ancient festival of Our Lady.”

                                    -Missale Romanum

The Catholic funeral home calendar
Prints “GROUNDHOG DAY (USA)” in generous type
“The Presentation of the Lord,” well, not so much
And “                                      ” 1 not at all

Perhaps one day we faithful will look out
From our dark-tunneled burrows of lost time
And gaze upon the morning shadows to ask
If there will be 2,000 more years of civilization

Because in the Temple

Our Lady presents unto our Lord the Child
But we present unto ourselves - a rat



1 The Purification of Our Lady

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                  On the Events of 13 July 2024

                                                  …that we but teach
****** instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th’ inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends th’ ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.

                                    -Macbeth I.vii.8-12

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                    An Envelope is its Own Story

An envelope in the post office parking lot
A woman parks next to it, looks down, and sneers
And puffs and heaves her ponderousness inside
To dock at the counter and make demands

I rescue the envelope and note the name and address
Oh, yes. I remember. That was all so sad
At least the daughter’s in the Army and safe enough
It’s a Christmas card. The man must have dropped it

I leave it at the counter, explaining the circs
The postal clerk accepts it back, and sneers

His battered old laptop slung across his back
That famous laptop with the sticker that reads
In font Albertus “This Machine Kills Haters”
He poses rustically on a railway line

His happenin’ hipster hat pulled ‘way down low
Over the deep-souled Eyes That Have Seen It All
While his slender, artistic fingers seem
To flutter in search of existential truth

(Or maybe two forms of identification)

While off camera a cop writes him a ticket
For trespassing on railway property

The Saunter of the Penguins

Across our lives the Penguins saunter along:
The Odyssey, The Ministry of Fear
Parade’s End, Penrod, To a God Unknown
Ragged with study, stained with tea and beer

Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Whitman’s Leaves
Tennyson, Wordsworth, The Alexiad
Monsignor Quixote, Wooster and Jeeves
And Yevtushenko – he was quite the lad!

Dog-eared and all crinkly, Scotch-taped with age -
Each Penguin is a wise, eternal sage

“I do none harm, I say none harm, I think none harm.”

-Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons

And yet how schadenfreude to imagine
The purported Melvin from Mumbai
Tipping the executioner for good service
(To Melvin a concept previously unknown):

          “Be not I understand afraid of your office I need your major    
            credit card and your date of birth you but send me I
            understand to that Limited Offer 30G in the Sky I
            understand.”

Or the executives of ISPs
Their eyes blindfolded with their own insolence
Standing before a new Customer Care Team
Drawn from a list of eager volunteers

Now look upon each techno-high-flyer

And

“Customer Care Team – Ready! Aim! Fire!”

The first Lenten penance is being told:
Lent is not just about giving up things
Lent is not just about giving up things
Lent is not just about giving up things

Lent is not just about giving up things
Lent is not just about giving up things
Lent is not just about giving up things
Lent is not just about giving up things

Lent is not just about giving up things…
*But did anyone ever say it was?

One might as well call this an equinox
For night and day are equinoxious now:
Mosquitoes, soul-withering heat and damp
Itch-allergens and rattlesnakes not featured

In advertising fantasies about
Bugless, unbitten happy families
Posing with plates and carnivorous smiles
Before neighbor-envious chromium grills

And playing free of heat rash and pustules
Around surgically sterile swimming pools

Prisoners in Our Own Cells

Sometimes we are prisoners in our own cells
Obsessed with approval from The Other
Still wanting to sit at the cool kids’ table
In the junior high cafeteria of life

But we are meant to live near an open door
And make a tabernacle of the cell
From whence, long since, a stone was rolled away,
And welcome to the modest Table there

All of outcast humanity to taste
The good, the true, and the beautiful

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

                                     ­         Communities

We often read about communities:

The intelligence community
The black community
The LGBT community
The arts community

Communities

The Hispanic community
The white community
The evangelical community
The educational community

Communities

One imagines a community:
Volunteer fire department, VFW
Parks, shops, a Methodist church across the street
From Our Lady of Guadalupe

Communities

But communities seem mostly to be
Lonely people stereotyping others
On the InterGossip with big ol’ words

From A Liturgy for the Emperor

We believe in God's holy empire too,
Byzantium, eternally golden
The Red-Apple Tree in the eastern sun
The City that echoes with laughing light
Through memory and history and beyond.
We believe in God and His Emperor,
And we believe that in the absence of
The Emperor, even then we must be
The Emperor's subjects, stubborn and true,
Wherever God has chosen to send us.
We then must rule our passions and our hearts,
Tend our gardens as if they were Eden --
Because they are -- and care for our children
As if angels were visiting tonight,
Until our God restores our Emperor,
Restores His City where the Earth-halves meet,
And finally, some day, some happy day,
Returns Himself to sit and rule enthroned
In His Three Romes, and in Jerusalem

Pilgrimage Along the A1

From Peterborough drops a road
Across the Fens, into the past
(Where wary wraiths still wear the woad);
It comes to Chesterton at last.

And we will walk along that track,
Or hop a bus, perhaps; you know
How hard it is to sling a pack
When one is sixty-old, and slow.

That mapped blue line across our land
Follows along a Roman way
Where Hereward the Wake made stand
In mists where secret islands lay.

In Chesterton a Norman tower
Beside Saint Michael’s guards the fields;
Though clockless, still it counts slow hours
And centuries hidden long, and sealed.

And there before a looted tomb,
Long bare of candles, flowers, and prayers,
We will in our poor Latin resume
Aves for old de Beauville’s cares.

A brave little man with a shopping bag
Defiantly stood before an army tank
A foul machine designed to grind free men
Into ****** scraps to be hosed away

Two unknown men - it was not the tank that stopped
It was the tank commander who stopped the tank
All that is left is old videotape:
Two bullets made all problems disappear

A brave little man with a shopping bag
Another brave man with a battle tank:

They stopped -
                              And, yes, someday China will be free

The Most Boring American Legion Meeting Ever

A Monologue in Two Parts

I.

Voice:

“Ya wanna talk prostrate1 cancer? I’ll tell ya
About prostrate cancer those PSAs
Don’t mean nothing and those doctors don’t know
Nothin’ I’ve had 15 on my PSA

“Ever since when and I ain’t got prostrate cancer
But this feller I knew he had a one on his
PSA and he had stage five cancer
And he died, so don’t tell me nothin’ about

“Prostrate cancer ‘cause I go the meetings
And so I know, I tell ya, yessir, I do…”


1Prostate, of course

II

Same Voice:

“Say, did y’all have any good buffets in Iraq
Or that other place Afghanistan
The buffets in Manila were expensive,
I tell ya, expensive, they cost forty dollars,

“Yessir, they did, and that was right down the street
From the embassy and that was too much
Just too much for what ya got, I tell ya
And they gave us ‘phone cards and they were made

“Right there and sixty minutes disappeared
Off it right when you dialed the number, yessir…”

L’Envoi

A Second Voice (in pain, weak, much like the voice of the Bleeding Sergeant in Macbeth):

“I move we adjourn.”

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                Let’s go for Coffee -- Grab Your Flak Jacket

Some give their sons semi-automatics and hate
Instead of family and purpose and love
Instead of guided study and structured faith
Instead of fishing poles and summer afternoons

We read that all functionaries in the Moscow Kremlin use typewriters and messengers for in-house communications.

Typewriters cannot be hacked.  The cleverest listening devices aboard lurking submarines and in space spy craft can pick up the tap-tap-tap of a typewriter, but cannot interpret an e-tap from a g-tap.

Better still, typewriters break down only every twenty years or so.  No typewriter sends you a message that the Microsoft Word lifetime package you bought has no existence, and that you must buy it again, nor does it give you a blue screen because it has no screen at all. A typewriter tells you nothing; you tell the typewriter with the nimbleness of your mind and fingers, and it obeys.

Beyond that, one does not imagine Vladimir Putin passing idle evenings playing Candy Crush. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia crush, maybe.

A computer, any computer, unlike the manly typewriter, often suffers the Aunt Pittypat vapors and falls into a faint, calling weakly for smelling salts.

Thus the brevity of this column.

Y'r 'umble scrivener has spent much of a beautiful spring day attempting to coax Aunt Pittypat into waking up and doing a little work:

But all Microsoft's horses (I was thinking of another quadruped, but the name is not appropriate for a family newspaper)

And all Microsoft's persons

Could not make Aunt Pittypat anything but worsens. (That's not a real word)

A personal computer is outdated before you get it home from the Godzilla Box Store, and this moribund machine is some four years old. In dog years that is...something; I forget what.

Tomorrow morning I am off to buy the cheapest machine I can find, for personal computers are as disposable as toilet paper.

I will pass another beautiful spring day re-installing programs and apps (because I am good about backing up all my files) and addresses and all the tiny little dragons that speed along its circuits, and by next week should have a brilliant and well-crafted story to tell you.

May your electrons never fail.

-30-

“When I was in Graduate School…”

“When I was in graduate school when I
Was at Oxford when I was working on
My doctorate at the Sorbonne when I
Was on my fellowship when I was hiking

The Andes on my gap year learning from
The Colourful Natives when I received
The Something-Something Prize for Young Poets
From The Oppressed Grant Recipients’ Front…”

One notices that

Literary articles never begin with
“When I was busting my knuckles on the drilling rig…”

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

                         Are We Looking Through Sauron’s Eye?

Through our glowing palantiri we watch
Dark images, shadowy and flickering
Ghostly men gathered around machines –
Are we looking through Sauron’s eye?

A silent flash, and structure disappears
Enveloped in blackness and liquid flame
Arcing bits of metal and bits of men -
Are we looking through Sauron’s eye?

Are we looking through Sauron’s eye?
And is that eye now turned on us?

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

Former President Trump Splits Two Infinitives and Botches a Number of Subject, Verb, and Adjective Constructs While Proposing the Arming of Teachers

    “...it's time to finally allow highly trained teachers to safely and
     discreetly concealed carry, let them concealed carry.”

                      -Former President Donald J. Trump
                    to the National Rifle ***., 27 May 2022

All teachers trample the Constitution
All teachers promote contempt for the Flag
All teachers should be in an institution
All teachers are weird (and that one’s a fxg)
All teachers despise the military
All teachers should be slowly microwaved
All teachers hate meat; they’re vegetary
All teachers hate Jesus; they can’t be saved
All teachers are evil; the children are harmed:

And thus, they say, all teachers should be armed

Previously published as “Texas’ Proposed Concealed Carry Law” in Dispatches from the Colonial Office, 2018, available from amazon.com.

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!

We’re All Icons Now

Is there anything left that isn’t iconic?
Each sports hero, actress, and tummy-tonic

Now let The People say “iconic”

Each recipe and coffee colonic
And every writer said to be Byronic

And let the reviewer chant “iconic”

Famous lovers, ****** or platonic
Mountains and islands, and plates tectonic

And let The Newsies type “iconic”

Animals natural or bionic
All weather systems, calm or cyclonic

And let Mr. Meteor cry “iconic!”

Every magazine is stuffed with “iconic”
Which any Byzantine would find ironic

And let the Romans cry “three dimensions!”

Wait...dimensions…declensions…these don’t rhyme with iconic…

Oh, and don’t forget that for every reviewer every writer weaves that same old  layered tapestry of…something or other

And when you go home tonight just be sure to hug your children

It’s Bad Only if Jenny’s Fried Chicken is Closed

Warnings and categories – a tropical storm
It’s really bad if Jenny’s has to close
No fried chicken, no electricity
No lights, no burgers, no coffee, no fries, no hope

A flashlight in the night is weak and pale
Our manna in exile - crackers and Spam
And coffee from a Thermos, not enough
To lift the spirits of the chicken-deprived

But now the sun is up, the storm has passed
O tell us that Jenny’s is open at last!

Our straw boss, now, she hyphenates her name
And there is something frightening about
Those faux dashes stapled between the nouns
Her proper nouns, as if they might slip loose

And fall onto the pages of Debrett’s
As isolated bits of DNA
Dropping their aitches and their gees, oh, please!
So tack that Burberry hyphen back again

Let no proletarian taint be seen -
Made in China becomes Fabrique en Chine

When Robert Frost visited President Kennedy
They spoke of poetry and power, of man
Of greatness and of God, of man’s swagger
Of poetry saving power from itself

When Robert Frost visited President Kennedy
They spoke of the poet’s responsibility
The duties of good men to other men
Of magnanimity and liberation

When Robert Frost visited President Kennedy
We lived a golden age in those few hours

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

                               In Nature We are Only a Menu Item

Purporting to love nature is a commonplace
This does not mean that nature loves us back
We often look for nature’s smiling face
But nature looks for us as a tasty snack

The alligator is defended for being here first
The gentle boar is a creature of God
Anopheles wants only to quench its thirst
The innocent shark hungers only for cod

Communing with nature cannot be beaten –
Up until the moment when you are eaten!

Stump Junction...



              “How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm
                          (After They've Seen Paree)?”

                       -a song of the First World War

Speak not to us of Paris by moonlight -
How are they gonna keep us down on the Seine
When we have seen the gaiety of Stump Junction
By the romantic glow of sweet mary jane

The twinkle of gunfire from a .22
As Cousin Eloise potted beer bottles
While her new guy Kolby took a long ////
On her old guy Shane-Boy’s low-rider rims

The county mounties busted up the fight -
Speak not to us of Paris by moonlight

The Social MePhone Justice Commandos of Toxic Doom

In the unending quest for social justice
Schoolroom shootings, unisex bakeries
Tornados, a steak, a snake, get off the plane
They’re all the same to the Omigod cult:

“Omigod Omigod Omigod O
Migod Omigod Omigod Omi
God Omigod Omigod Omigod
Omigod Omigod Omigod O!

“Chapsnat bookface tubeyou my relationship
It’s complicated Omigod Omi”

On this dark day, this evil day, this day
In a railway carriage on a branch line
Three hundred years of civilization
And millions of lives, three generations
Were signed away with a few penned words
In a railway carriage on a branch line
On this dark day, this evil day, this day

A Morning Dialogue with One’s Self

I.
(As both the alarm clock and the smart phone make unpleasant noises)

Today is the first day of the rest of…
Put a sock in it, all right? It’s too early
For optimism. Two feet to the floor
Yes, two feet, same number as last night

II.
(The bed does not care whether it is made up)

Not making the bed. Those two feet forward
North to the kitchen and the coffee ***
Switch on. Window humidity-streaked
Cats posing prettily in the dawn-light

III.
(The coffee machine gurgles happily)

A fresh new day, and with it new adventures
Still not making up that bed.  Don’t gotta.

Something About Life

                                      “Live.  Just live.”

                               -Yuri in Doctor Zhivago

The plane lifted, and the cheering was wild
And then pretty quickly the pilot said
“We are now clear of Vietnamese
Territorial waters.”  There was joy,
Even wilder cheering for most, and quiet
Joy for a few.  For me, Karamazov
To hand, peace, and infinite gratitude.
“I’m alive,” I said to myself and to God,
“Alive.  I will live, after all.”  To read, to write,
Simply to live.  Not for revolution,
Whose smoke poisons the air, not for the war,
Not to withdraw into that crippling self-pity
Which is the most evil lotus of all,
But to live.  To read, to write.
                                            But death comes,
Then up the Vam Co Tay, or now in bed,
Or bleeding in a frozen February ditch;
Death comes, scorning our frail, feeble, failing flesh,
But silent then at the edge of the grave,
For all graves will be empty, not in the end,
But in the very beginning of all.

The Super-Golly-Gee-**** Dog Food as Advertised on the Radio

O Alpha and Omega 3 Fish Oil
Now leach into Pup’s liver with great lust
Bring Old Blue’s lycopene to a steamy boil
Resurrect my beagle, O, yes, you must!

O fatty magnesiumed manganese
Seep into Fluffy’s geriatric joints
Pureed from a genuine Portuguese
(Lusitanian flesh never disappoints)

Heart arrhythmia, rashes, and lumba-gee-oh -
Trust your pet’s health to an ad on the radio!

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

                        A Song of the Lord in a Foreign Land

          “How could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?

                                             -Psalm 137

By the waters of the common sinks and stinks
They sat and wept, remembering their homes
Upon the razor wire they hung their hopes
          (Let my tongue be silent during roll call)

Their captors asked of them throughout the hours
Straight lines to the chow hall, well made-up bunks
On time to their classes and work details
          (Let my tongue be silent during roll call)

The lyrics of their songs were written by night
The notes and tones well-tuned to concrete walls
How could they sing songs of the Lord?
                                              How not?
          (Let my tongue be silent during roll call)

We all are exiles in a foreign land
          (Let our tongues sing praise after roll call)


(After over a year of lockdowns, volunteers are allowed back into Texas prisons today, Wednesday, Saint Patrick’s Day, 17 March 2021. Saint Patrick, too, was a prisoner.)

For Eugenio Corti

Perhaps the site is now a garbage heap
A parking lot, a drainage ditch, a field
Where little children chase a soccer ball
Among the flowers of a Russian spring

Whispering a memory of Italy
For here a poor Italian soldier died
His life ripped from him in a desolation
Of screams and violence and frozen horror:

But he is a candle, lit again, in Heaven where
His feet are always warm, and “Savoia!” is a hymn