A Night of Fallen Nothingness

The Altar stripped, the candles dark, the Cross
Concealed behind a purple shroud, the sun
Mere slantings through an afternoon of grief
While all the world is emptied of all hope.
The dead remain, the failing light withdraws
As do the broken faithful, silently,
Into a night of fallen nothingness.

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                Even the Oak Trees are Dying

              “Wildfire…evacuation of nearby residences under way”

                                               -news bulletin

Poor drought-dead leaves in mockery of autumn
Wind-rustle across the lawn as the dried husks they are
Rattling like withered exoskeletons along the dust
Or The Ancient Mariner’s dead sailors upon the deck

The exhausted earth is hot from a summer of drought
Cicadas have no hope in their poor songs
A drifting dragonfly wobbles in its flight
And the weather reports are but cruel teasings

The sour smoke of a month of forest fires
Chokes even the stars, who in despair do not appear

Time stops. The sweep hand seconds that no-motion
It fluttered in warning for several days
You were warned, and now you are out of time
That thing on your wrist is now but a weight

Oh, what is the nature of time? one asks
Oh, where is there a fresh 370?
The watch-opener reposes patiently
The tiny screwdrivers wait silently

Because without a 370 battery

(Which you can’t find in this town)

A watch is only useless tattery

Paleo-Hippies at Work and Play

Having withdrawn from the existential struggle,
Surrendering their arms and protest signs,
They muster in Denny’s for the Senior Special
Uniformed in knee-pants and baseball caps
And Chinese tees that read “World’s Greatest Grandpa,”
Hearing aids and trifocals at parade rest,
And quadrupedal aluminum sticks
Raging against the oxygen machine.
Not trusting anyone over ninety,
They rattle their coffee cups and dentures
Instead of suspicious Nixonians,
And demand pensions, not revolution.
They mourn classmates dead, not The Grateful Dead.
They do not burn their Medicare cards
Tho’ once they illuminated the world
With their flaming conscription notices.
They no longer read McKuen or Tolkien
Or groove to ‘way-cool Peter, Paul, and Mary;
Their beads and flowers are forever filed
In books of antique curiosities
Beside a butterfly collection shelved
In an adjunct of the Smithsonian
Where manifestos go to be eaten
By busy mice and slow-pulsing fungi.
As darkness falls they make the Wheel, not love

They did not change the world, not at all, but
The world changed anyway, and without them,
And in the end they love neither Jesus
Nor Siddhartha, but only cable t.v.

A woman. A knife. A very sharp knife.
She has waited for this hour, this moment
Her eyes – they gleam with passion dark upon
A figure recumbent upon a slab

She is not alone; she is being watched
But no one will dare cry for her to stop
They have all made their agreement, their bond
And now the woman lifts the knife…she strikes…!

She has cut the heart from an artichoke
And the studio audience applauds

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

                       Bob Newhart and the Treadmill of Sisyphus

                                                    “Hi­, Bob!”

                        Exercising While Watching BOB NEWHART

Several times each day I roll myself up
The torturous treadmill of Sisyphus
I am more of a marshmallow than a rock
Which is the point of this tiresome endeavor

Several times each day I find myself back
At the foot of the devilish device
To wheeze myself wheeze step wheeze step wheeze step
To promised abs of steel at the rainbow’s end

Dr. Hartley is on line one because
Sometimes you need
A telephone call from your driving instructor

Dear Somebody,

Being added to a collection is an honor; however, although I am not, not, not prissy, I do not want to be associated with a site whose title contains obscenities.  You are free to employ puerile language, and I am free not to do so.  Please delete my poem.

The Desperate Princewives in Toronto

On Christmas eve a lineman hoists herself
Far up into the blowing ice to mend
The power that keeps our children warm at night
While waiting for good Santa Claus to come

On Christmas Day a cop patrols the streets
Alone against snipers with ‘47s
Keeping us safe while we grumble about cops
She’s left her children with her mom to watch

The morning after Christmas another mom
Jump-starts her ten-year-old car so she can drive
The slushy streets to her shift at Dairy Queen
For her career ladder at the deep fryer

In a studio in Canada two men
Well-guarded by their secret services
Well-fed, well-dressed well-chauffeured in their ‘zines
Escorted, piloted, guided, scripted

Express their happiness that working folk
Are wealthier and healthier than ever

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                          Faces Among the Leaves

               At first she thought it was but the rock and the bushes…
               But all at once she was aware of a face among the leaves…

                        -Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter

There are curious faces among the leaves
Among the trees and sometimes in the trees
Along the road a little old man appears
Looking at me from the trunk of a rotting pine

He seems to be a little bit annoyed
But not dangerous; he’s become used to me
Tapping along with my shiny hiker’s stick
Searching the winter sky for something of truth

And there are bare feet dancing in the underbrush
And faces in the trees I must not see

An Old Man Running While Carrying a Volume of The World Book Encyclopedia

A Scene from a Hospital Waiting Room

Cups of coffee are reverently borne
Along the bright hospital corridors
By nurses, doctors, technicians, and all
Scrub-suited healers on their dutiful rounds

But wait! A lean, energetic old man
His wild white hair brimming his gimme cap
Dodges among the sacred cups, and runs
Up the stairs to the ICU waiting room

Clutching an old encyclopedia
Like a dispatch from the front –
                                                               I wish I’d asked

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

                                   Being a ‘Possum Must be Rough

                                      A Dachshund’s Night Patrol

Being a ‘possum can only be rough
Dragged all over the yard by a dachshund
A furious dachshund half its size
Until it collapses into a faint

And unconscious cannot see the absurdity
Of this old man chasing the dachshund all over the yard
Explaining that the ‘possum is a beneficent species
Demanding obedience, and receiving none

It’s not at all biblical, but even so
I command the dog to let my ‘possum go

(No ‘possums were harmed in the making of this minor marsupial motion picture)

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

                                 Coffee Shop Darwinians

          “We’ll set a fine, new, well-oiled machine in place
            of the old one and this time we’ll put the Normans
            into it instead. That’s what justice means, isn’t it?”

                                        -Saxon Monk in Becket

No, of course it didn’t have to happen
We’re not campus coffee shop Darwinians
Determined that five innocents needed to die
Within the gears of our new, well-oiled machine

And that more should come, chanting “O Machine!” 1
“Follow the Science!” and “Learn. To. Code!”
As they sacrifice themselves to a Tweeter-sanctioned
Infestation of Manifest Destiny

And I’ve got a feeling, as you might agree:
No one on either side quotes Dostoyevsky


1 “The Machine Stops,” E. M. Forster

Midwatch and Matins - Recruit Training, San Diego

In youth

Awakened by another sailor, one stands
A sleepy watch, leggings and dungarees,
A Springfield rifle at right-shoulder arms,
A-yawn, awash in midnight fog to guard
A clothesline of national importance

In age

Brought now to sudden weary wakefulness
By those eternal mysteries we muse,
Bereft by noisy day’s false comforts, we
Begin the nocturnal lessons of truth
Because some nights we must stand watch again.

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

                                    A­n Indignant Dachshund

When my little dogs stops and pps and ps
She expects a little privacy, please!

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

                         Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Inmates

                                 A Sign Along a Texas Road

Hitchhikers may be escaping inmates

Newton is one way, and Jasper the other
Along the two-lane blacktop between the fields
A farmer in chambray blue cultivates his corn
And lads in prison whites cultivate the state’s

Hitchhikers may be escaping inmates

The passerby wonders if the hitchhikers
Are escaping from inmates or if
The hitchhikers are the inmates who choose
Not to be inmates at the moment

Hitchhikers may be escaping inmates

And then there’s the difference between “may” and “might”
Hitchhikers and inmates, soon out of sight

Maybe we’re all trying to escape something

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

                   Can Internet Service Providers be Saved?

                      Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.

                                     -Leonard Cohen

Multiple Voices from an ISP:

Our order support team reported back…
you had 2 work orders. Your work order with us
has been cancelled and the email you forwarded
to me is the installation group you will need
to contact about scheduling. Sorry…We have received
this work order that was already scheduled for 5/8
morning. There are no notes from any dispatcher
speaking to you and changing the appointment
date/time. Below are the notes on the account
and no appointment changes have been made.
Called to t/s modem; modem is offline…
t/s modem is offline…Upgrade for
the Unlimited Bronze 12…set expectations…
I do not know who this sales group is. They
do state you are scheduled for 5/4 but the work
order they sent to the 3rd party installer
shows your [sic] scheduled for 5/8. We do not
have techs in your area tomorrow…I have sent
your account to the order support team…Your appointment
scheduled [sic] has been updated…Changes have been made
to your ViaSat account.

API INSERT (Note) 04/30/2021 11:01:56 AM CDT BEP scheduling work order during creation. API UPDATE (Schedule Date) 04/30/2021 11:01:56 CDT Unscheduled Unassigned API INSERT (Note) 04/30/2021 11:01:53 AM CDT

Installation notes…Our records indicate…
We need to confirm your appointment…Your appointment
schedule has been updated…as your preferred date
could not be accommodated. We sincerely apologize…
We have been trying to reach you with the number you provided…
We have received your work order and would like to confirm…
Sorry, we were unable to deliver your message
to the following address…Your Viasat Internet
payment failed…Payment has not been received…
If you do not make a full payment soon…
relaying denied…To avoid interruption
of your Viasat service…You may also call us…
agent assist fees may apply…

Thanks for being a Viasat internet customer!

Contra* William Carlos Williams

The only realism in art is of the imagination.  It is only thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation.

                              -Spring and All, p. 35

A leaf sometimes might seem to be a bee
Afloat upon the humming summer air
The tiny tree-ness of some greater Tree
Or brolly of a fairy-lady fair

A leaf may be presented as a shield
In chlorophyllic marching order trimmed
Its veins as dents received upon the field
The eye of each woody cell dying and dimmed

But even so

In this, inter-warriors, come not to grief
For in the end, a leaf is still a leaf

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

                                   The Bowre of Blisse

               Goodly it was enclos’ed rownd about,
               As well their entered guests to keep within,
               As those unruly beasts to hold without;
               Yet was the fence thereof but weake and thin

            -Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto XII

While much of the world is bleeding and burnt
Democracy takes a summer holiday
Far away in Maryland’s gentle woods and hills
Where the screams of tortured children cannot be heard

Among the gardened and guarded streams and trees
Elderly men are guided in their play
By smiling minders gentle in their words
And ready with the proper remedies

While those who code are kept carefully near
To sweeten the words the old gentlemen hear

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

                                  Censorship by the Proletariat

There is a topic in the news today
Most worthy of a throw-away line
But in our cultural lockdown there is no way
To share a joke, however benign

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                            ­  Schrodinger’s Turtle

                    Don’t let a quantum mechanic work on your car

A cat on a fence post probably got there himself
And may be observed to be alive or dead
A turtle in a box is not on a shelf
“And I don’t know why,” the scientist said

“Meow,” the poor little cat cried out in dread



Please know that I am on the ViaSat / Verizon / Directv / Netgear axis of frequent lack of service. I never ignore correspondence, but in the mornings my InterGossip works very slowly at best and in the evenings even more slowly and increasingly not at all. Responding to you may take some time.

Decorating a Mansion

Let be set out a wooden crucifix
Of indifferent and artless workmanship
Upon a table where the lamplight falls
In yellow circles on a book or two,
And sheets of paper and a quirky pen.

Let be set up a surplus Navy bunk
With mattress and blanket, and pillow too,
If Brother Guestmaster has them to hand,
Luxury enough for merciful sleep,
Or combat desperate against fearful dreams.

Let be set into the wall a hook or nail
To serve the office of a wardrobe there,
Burdened with little but perhaps too much:
A decent habit for the liturgies,
A worn-out coat, a hat against the sun.

Let be set into the cell an exile,
A man of no reputation at all,
Unnoticed in the streets, unseen, unknown,
But who delights in anonymity,
Here in this palace in Jerusalem.

Road Breakfast

Greasy spoons are a little too clean these days
After the sweet incense of cigarette smoke
Was purged by a Vatican II of health
Along with the morning paper. It’s all

Plastic tablets and gourmet coffees now
Multi-colored packets of chemicals
Flatware in little cellophane envelopes
Bright cartoon tees instead of stained work shirts

Cross-trainers where muddy boots used to rest -
Greasy spoons are just too d**d clean these days

Does the Point Vanish? Or do We?

In poetry there is no vanishing point
No lines converging in flat distances
Upon a gessoed plane of pleynt and paint
Skillfully rendered for the imagination

In poetry lines flow as languid streams
Or sometimes storm the soul as wilding floods
For seldom do they pause and build a pose
Because lines are imagination


No
                           Lines converge in flat dis
                               Tances because in
                                   Poetry there
                                     Is no van
                                        Ishing
              ­                                 .

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

                               For the 20th of January
                                      1961 and 2021


                 The deed of gift was many deeds of war

                                         -Robert Frost

Miz Hawkins brought a television to school
So we could watch the inauguration
Of a president “born in this century”
But he seemed really old to us anyway

God looked like President Eisenhower
And God was surely a Methodist
President Kennedy was a Cath’lic
(In their basements they hid shortwaves and guns)

Shortwaves tuned to the Vatican and that ol’ Pope
So could a Cath’lic be a good American?
But the nation was young, and so were we
And America was God’s best creation

And because America was the Leader of the World
And we had whipped the Nazis and the **** [sic]
All by ourselves, and invented the Bomb
We were the blessing of democracy over all

Robert Frost spoke grand words in the January frost
I was hoping for his “Stopping by Woods”
Because I had memorized that in school
But he gave us something else, “The Gift Outright”

And then with frosted breath the President
Asked us what we could do for our country
Our country later asked us about Viet-Nam
But for now Miz Hawkins shushed all us deeds of gift

The nation was young that day, and so were we –

And everything seems so much older now
Our long ago optimism a deed of gift
To angry old men whose voices rattle

Rattle from behind armored glass and barbed wire
Barbed wire left over from DaNang and Saigon
And a thousand abandoned desert posts
Each a gift outright to Ozymandias

Who late bestrode the littered Capitol steps
His wrinkled lips loud-yelping in command
Over our increasingly antique land
“Made it, Ma! Top of the World!”

The happy crowds of ’61 are sand
There are no crowds in ’21, only silence
Behind ranks of soldiers (properly vetted)
Standing in empty streets, waiting for a Traveller

References:

Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright”
Shelley, “Ozymandias”
Warner Brothers, White Heat (film), 1949

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

                                       The Petrograd Paradigm

He has more than a touch of Komarovsky
Loyal to nothing but his appetites
Cigars, sensualties, sins, and souls
All of them casually disposable

He gives more than a touch of Komarovsky
He whips the dogs, and tests the snow to know
If it blows from the east or from the west
And throws his latest values to the wolves

He takes more than a touch of Komarovsky
Asking the oldest question: “What’s in it for me?”

The Local Department Store’s Last Christmas

The overly-arranged rat-packery
Of cool-cat Christmas songs from the fifties
Descends like stardust date-expired upon
The ghosts of Christmases that never were

The aisles are teeming only with those notes
Because unlike the music of the past
Old customers have not been stored on tapes
To be replayed among the China-made

White Christmas Drummer Boy Jingle-Bell Rocks
Only mechanical air wah-wah-wah

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

                    I Will Never Take Instruction from a Consonant

Whenever I’m down, and feeling a little blue
I wonder whatever it is I can do
What traditional learning I can pursue
To recover the happiness I once knew

I shun the transient, the ever-new
The latest fashions the unlettered construe
For I will follow Wisdom, just and true
Wherever She leads me, my whole life through

I will never take instruction from a consonant
And I know, wise friend, that neither will you

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Time Travel

On a stack of giveaways, a paperback:
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – The Mad Scientist Affair
Napoleon with each sable hair in place
And Ilya in his groovy turtleneck

Poised for action on a four-color cover
With clever gadgets against wicked T.H.R.U.S.H.
Spies, guns, jet planes, secret lairs, beautiful girls
Mr. Waverly, and “Open Channel D”

Solo and Kuryakin, so cool, yeah, man -
Teachers and parents – they just didn’t understand!

Suggested by a Thought from Temporal Fugue

Because we respect words, we wrestle with them
And because they respect us, they wrestle back;
We shape them in order serviceable 1
And they refuse to be pinned as cliches’

We fling a needful verb against a noun
To make a thought complete, but then adverbs
And adjectives begin cluttering lines
And then we all must take a coffee break

Because we respect words, we wrestle with them
For every scrap of story, verse, or hymn


1 Cf. John Milton, “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

She gently takes the proffered nibbly bite
Between her toothful jaws, my little ally
This is our bedtime custom every night
That’s why my dog is fat - and so am I!

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                  The Dime-Store Philosophy of Kahlil Gibran

            How The Prophet Made Kahlil Gibran a Household Name in
            America ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)

The dime-store philosophy of Kahlil Gibran
                    (“Daddy, what’s a dime-store? And what’s a dime?”)
Reposing mostly undisturbed on brick-and-board shelves
The free-verse love-salad of Rod McKuen
And Lord of the Rings in 50-cent paperbacks

The Seekers played over and over on the phonograph
                     (“Daddy, what’s a phonograph? Is it something bad?”)
Have you heard The Mamas and the Papas’ latest single?
Peter, Paul & Mary in “stacks of wax”
Three-chord commandos in every coffee shop

Looking back - it wasn’t the greatest stuff
But for the time and place, it was good enough

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.c­om
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com

                                                 Wake Up, Back Yard!

Wake up, back yard! The day is warm and bright
The water hoses are stiff, the nozzles are fouled
And I’m stiff too, but we are called by the morning light
To celebrate this spring-before-spring day

Brave seedlings from last year’s sunflowers arise
Among the tiny wings of zinnia buds
And the pushy skunk cabbages who hang around
Like playground bullies who ought to go find jobs

The yellow pollen teases through my nose
And everywhere this happy new year grows!

A poem is a pilgrim’s haversack
All neatly, tightly packed for walkabout:
Toothbrush and rhymes rolled together betimes
Spare socks and meter tucked in with great care

And pocket knife and similes as if
Skivvies and metaphors were something else
Alliteration lined in lovingly
Syntax and shaving kit accessible

Because

When organized in compact unity
Poems and haversacks engage a life that’s free

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

                   But Mom, All the Cool Kids are into Genocide!

                       “Students! Be the Fuhrer’s Propagandists!”

          **** poster ca. 1933, per Library of Congress: [Studenten seid
          Propagandisten des Führers Hoch-u. Fachschulen bekennen
          sich am 29. März zur Deutschen Freiheitsbewegung /
          (loc.gov)]

All the cool kids are into genocide
Slogans and posters and bullhorns and cries
Abandoning their studies to march outside
And scream the same 2,000-year-old lies

The InterGossip commands, and they obey
Blocking the streets and clenching each fist
Waving misspelt signs and yelling all day
Never pausing to ask if there’s something they’ve missed

Am I a hollow echo for some sycophant’s squall?
Will I fail to think for myself at all?

Poetry of the Occupation

          “…trained in the politics of the day, believing the great new
           system invented by a genius so great that they never
           bothered to verify its results.”

                              -John Steinbeck, The Moon is Down

Political poetry occupies the streets
Brakes squealing to a stop before an idyll
Squads of inclusive wordtroopers disembark
Into our souls to force submission and love

Armed with warrants and inquisitions
The bills of indictment already drawn
Needing only a tap upon a screen
To serve in the office of a signature

And sensitive to death the personal life -
Political poetry occupies the streets

Lawrence Hall HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                            You are Going to Write a Poem Today

                             A poet's words can outlive empires
                             and shake the foundations of tyrants.

                                              -Yevtushenko

You are going to write a poem today
Although you will never finish it
For the hours, or a person from Porlock
Will lead you to pause your thought for a time

Your poem will repose as a meditation
A word upon the altar of your mind
And even as you are distracted at Mass
Your poem becomes a tiny sip of salvation

All the truthing words that have come to you -
There on your mindful altar they bless the world

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

                     A Cloud of Unknowing in Ordinary Time

Sometimes life doesn’t make any sense
You’d think that hurting like an adolescent
Would end with adolescence
But it doesn’t

Maybe we can find some good in the hurt
That when we hurt we’re carrying someone else’s hurt
It sounds awfully thin
Maybe it’s enough

We will not turn on the radio today
We will repudiate its veto over us
We will silence its news and its noise
We will not wait upon its appointed hours

We will sit in the windowlight and read
Maybe the Great Books, or maybe the funnies
-The funnies!
Let’s read the funnies to each other, and laugh
About Charlie Brown and his kite-eating tree

And joyfully fling the funnies and ourselves
Upon the sunbeams, all over the floor

I am a clerisy of one
I argue with myself a lot
And as I speak I know I’ve won
I’m all about me, and you are not

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                 But First There was President Grant’s Speeding Ticket

I’ve never been arrested, but, hey, I’m still young; there’s a chance.  Some of the nicest people I know have spent the occasional weekend at the county sheriff’s resort and spa, some opting for longer stays, so I wonder if I’ve been missing something.

If someday I receive a stainless steel invitation to jail I can’t imagine that a private jet and a motorcade will be part of the intake process, or that extra police and the Secret Service will escort me, or that barriers and blocked-off streets will ease my way inside to the receptionist, concierge, complimentary cocktails, a fingerprint manicure, souvenir photographs, and all the other amenities I’ve been reading about with regard to the anticipated indictment of a former president this week.

I don’t recall any stories about law officers or attorneys general sending courtesy notes to wanted men to turn themselves in, pretty please, but then I am behind the times in so many ways. Perhaps soon all arrests will be prefaced by formal courtesies:


5 April 2023

Dear Mr. Percival “Snake Eyes” Thorpe-Ponsonby,

You are cordially invited to a reception hosted by
The Sheriff and the District Attorney
At the County Courthouse on

17 April 2023
2:00 P.M.

Valet Parking
Dress: Afternoon Business Casual

RSVP

In 1872 William H. West, a D.C. city police officer, did not send then-President Ulysses Grant an invitation or a ticket-by-mail; he collared him in the streets of the Capitol for speeding in his one-horse buggy. Officer West, who was a Civil War veteran and black, is reported to have said to the President:


"I cautioned you yesterday, Mr. President, about fast driving, and you said, sir, that it would not occur again…I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation, and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest."

-Ulysses S. Grant Was Arrested 151 Years Before Trump's Indictment (businessinsider.com)

The President did not pull the ****** “Don’t you know who I am!?” thing, paid his $20 fine, and was apparently a more careful driver thereafter.

And that, dear readers, is a wonderful remembrance of one of those moments when this nation got things just right.

-30-

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.c­om
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com

                  ­    Corporal Karamazov Flies Home from the War

                                           “Which war?”

                            “Your war – there’s always a war.”

Every young reader sees Alyosha in himself
A sensitive mystic, misunderstood by most
Questing for an answer to a question unasked
Politely shown the door by Father Zosima

As Old Karamazov? Impossible
53 is an age of antiquity
As Dimitri, Ivan, and Smerdyakov?
They are unable to sort out themselves

Lost in thought in a contract airline seat:

A 22-year-old just two days off the line
A patriarchal colonialist ideologue

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

                        More Than a Container for Words

               The book was so much more than  
             a container for words inscribed on pages

                                 -David Rundle

A container for words; there’s something in that
For if it contains words, it contains dreams
Your portable dreams, your vade mecum
In code, waiting to be interpreted

A container for words, humming with life
With verbs wanting to pour out all the nouns
And fling the adjectives in front of them
With conjunctions and adverbs (only a few)

A container for words, a book, your book
Which you began writing when you were born

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/book-revelation/?cakeycode=FA9LQA3

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

                Contagious Disease Unit – Ward 20 Deck 2

Maybe my aptitude for throwing up
My ENT infections, fevers and chills
Hopeless motion sickness and fainting fits
Were the reasons why NavPers posted me there

All the diseases in the Fleet called it home:
Infections, syphilis, leprosy, the clap
(Let’s give him a hand), and for reasons not clear
A couple of crewmen from the Pueblo

Before I was sent to be sick in Indo-China -
And now they say there’s a virus going around

Five Ashtrays Along the Bar

A bartender named Blue, old hound-dog face
Cigarettes in ashtrays along the bar
One for the man who didn’t get that raise
Another for the man whose wife has gone

A third for the McKuen who scribbles free verse
A fourth for the silent philosopher
A fifth for the girl waiting for her call
To the tiny stage to show ‘em what’s she’s got

Leather jackets at the billiards table
A neon beer sign as the sanctuary lamp

I regret to inform you that I am terminating
Your employment with my computer.
Several months ago you began failing
In your duties; your performance was poor
And sometimes you left work without notice.
Last week you didn’t show up at all.
You refused to be repaired and you refused
To be re-installed, and so I am letting you go.

This week you have taken to sending me notes
That you are the default program and wish
To resume your duties.  I must tell you
That I have hired a Mr. Freeware, who
Shows up every day and does the work well.
Not only does he work, he works for free.
I would not have met him had you not failed,
And so, you see, it’s really your own fault.

You need not ask for a reference.

Sincerely,

Lawrence Hall, HSG

For Isaac Babel

Babel, you hated Russian, Pole, and Jew
You wrote as you were told, in ink all Red
You wrote the same old bigotry, nothing new
In gratitude dear Stalin shot you dead

On the 20th of July in ‘69
I was on the Tien Sha peninsula
Probably shooting penicillin
Into some kid’s /ss for gonorrhea

(That too was a moon shot)

And listening to Radio AFVN
Not paying any attention at all
To Kennedys landing on the surface of
Their girlfriends and then leaving them to die

Soon I was sent to see the moon in Cambodia
More bodies floating in the water there

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

                                     When the Rescuers Stood Down

                                               Surfside, Florida

As the rescuers stood down last night they left
Their prayers, their desperate hopes, their bitter tears
Upon those troubled rocks where they poured out love
They poured themselves, and they are empty now

What’s left must soon come down:

Concrete and steel, toys and dolls, Mama’s pictures
Letters from friends, ‘phones that won’t ring anymore
Eyeglasses, fountain pens, lesson plans, books
Spare change, unfinished poems, unfinished lives

The rescuers will return, and try again
Because their hearts are in that wreckage still

She is a 10,000-year-old girl
Although she is rather younger today
Only 240 or so
While taking coffee with James Madison

She has discussed the weather with Gilgamesh
Given Keats her handkerchief for his cough
Danced with the fairies on Midsummer Eve
And captured the castle with Cassandra

Because she has listened when the Nine have sung
An old soul she is, and so
                                                         forever young