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

                       A Laser Focus on Screaming Deaths

               Look upon my Works, ye Mighty, and despair

                               -Shelley, “Ozymandias”

Laser focus laser focus laser
Focus laser focus laser focus
Laser focus teens falling to their deaths
Laser focus escape for two thousand dollars

Laser focus or a promissory note
If the enemy overrun the airport
We’ll laser focus your refund back to you
With this laser focus degree of precision  

Shredded body in the laser focus
Of the wheel well

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

                         “This Waiting Room of the World”

          I’ve always found this a trying time of the year.  The leaves
          not yet out, mud everywhere you go.  Frosty mornings
          gone.  Sunny mornings not yet come.  Give me blizzards and
          frozen pipes, but not this nothing time, not this waiting room
          of the world.

                                            -Jack in Shadowlands

Slow raindrops are the pulse that marks the time
Which falls with them upon the browning leaves
Each one of them a railway station bench
In a darkened world where trains have ceased to run

The ticket window is closed the rest of the day
But someone says the local will run tomorrow
Maybe around two if the tracks are cleared
Of all the hopes that seem to block the line

But maybe not, for nothing seems to move
And the journeys of life are forbidden to us

The Fifth Karamazov

When young we identify with Alyosha
His optimism and his innocence
His fragile, flowering Orthodox1 faith
A happy, almost-holy fool for Christ

When older, the sensual Dimitri,
With irresponsible lusts and desires
Grasping for the rewards of the moment
Now, ever now, wanting everything now

Then older still, as intellectual Ivan
Sneeringly aloft, above all faith and flesh
A constructor of systems and ideas
From the back pages of French magazines

Though never do we identify with
Nest-fouling, leering, lurking Smerdyakov
Our secret fear, unspoken fear, death-fear:
That he might be who we untruly are

But hear, O hear, the holy bells of Optina2
Those Russian messengers3 singing to us
Inviting us to meet Alyosha again
At Father Zosima’s poor4 hermitage


1Russian Orthodox
2The name of the real monastery upon which Dostoyevsky modeled his fictional one
3The Brothers Karamazov was first published as a serial in The Russian Messenger
4Poor only by earthly standards

Teddy bears ribboned to a chain-link fence,
Plastic-wrapped flowers stacked like compost,
Dime-store candles flickering in the exhaust
Of passing mini-vans.  The inanity
Of filler-language falls, descends upon
The shattered souls of the barely alive,
The dead cliches’ of well-planned camera-grief:
“Our hearts and thoughts go out to you.”
What does that mean?  Nothing but conventional noise
For generations of lovers and mourners
Long ago looted of reality,
Programmed with state-sanctioned hyperbole,
And mourners now are left with nothing but
An existential howl against the light,
Sodium-vapor upon broken glass,
While strident Men of Destiny
There rake for votes among the ashes of death.

Lady Day

And now comes Lady Day, a new year’s day
When happier hours to summering begin
And farmers follow their ploughs among new fields
While in the hedgerows early snowdrops bloom

Old debts are settled, new agreements made
And the oldest promise of all proves True
On this the day of the Annunciation
As spring comes early in Galilee, and here

And all because our Lady said yes to Life
On this our Lady’s day, a new year’s day

No one ever figured out how Schlomo
Got off the ship with a life jacket
 
But there he was on the pier among the crowd
Sitting sadly on his little brown suitcase
 
And wearing a life jacket from the ship
With "Orinoco" stenciled across it
 
A sailor in a white uniform wanted it
But Schlomo would not take it off
 
A policeman in a blue uniform wanted it
But Schlomo would not take it off
 
Schlomo's father told him he wanted it
But Schlomo would not take it off
 
And on the bus ride through the city
Schlomo would not let go of it
 
And for weeks Schlomo wore his life jacket
 
In the park
In the dark
 
In his schule
In his school
 
Until one day in the park on the river's bank
He took it off
He threw it in
It promptly sank
 
Then he said to himself, our little Schlomo,
"I knew somehow - it was time to let go."

How is it that a man can live a long
And happy life in the service of God
And humanity without ever having made
A deep study of the cultivation
Of eyelashes?

That clockwork school! If it’s not gearing up
Then it's winding down, except in the fall
Which then is when it’s gearing up again
But not in the spring, when it is winding down

Sometimes it’s just around the corner where
Presumably it is still gearing up
But maybe winding down, somewhere in town
Waiting for the fall to come back around

Then winding down, having worn out its spring
But back in the fall, you see; that’s the thing!

Uncle Vanya and Lady Godiva

Uncle Vanya came strolling down the road
Wishing he had made something of his life
His young friend Anne loquaciously agreed
And with remarkable vehemence urged him

     to endeavour to remediate his perceived inadequacies in the    
     many precedent matters that burdened him…

Don Quixote suggested that worries were giants
Cassandra said, “There is only one page left”
Nick Adams whispered, “Shh! You’ll scare the fish!”
Ambrose Silk asked the way to the world’s end

And young Lady Godiva, sans chemise
Outsourced her image on souvenir tees

“…the war…often seems to have happened to someone else.”

-C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

A pickup truck beside a Navajo road
Tables of souvenirs, a Thermos of coffee
Clotheslines of dreamcatchers catching the sun
For now; the dreams must wait for sleepless hours

“You were in Viet-Nam,” the old man said
To another old man. No mystery;
He simply took a chance to make a sale
And did, for both had known the Vam Co Tay

Old men along the road, catchers of dreams
Who burned their chances in the long ago

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

                       Robin Hood and Jacques Derrida

As the first stars came out above the leaves
Of Merry Sherwood, the lads in peaceful repose
Put away their after-supper mending of gear
And idled over their ale of October brewing

Then Robin Hood spoke to Allan-a-Dale:

Don’t sing to us of Neo-Post-Colonial White Supremacist Patriarchal People-of-Color Matriarchal LGBTQTY Non-Binary Feminist Chomskian Existentialist (existentialist – how quaint) Hegelian Post-Structuralist Logocentric Sausurian Psychoanalytical Post-Modern Marxist Jungian New Critical Cognitive Scientific Neo-Anarchic Canon-Repudiationist Neo-Informalist Catarrhic De-Constructionism.

Sing to us
                                                       a story.

For Rod McKuen

The gentle singer of our youth has died
The poet of empty Sunday afternoons
And solitary strolls through Balboa Park
Among lovers and Frisbee-chasing dogs

Of laughing with shipmates while cleaning rifles
Because we knew more than the armorer
About dreaming away from learning war
About pretty girls laughing in the sun

And a chansonnier in sweater, sneaks, and jeans:
The gentle singer of our youth has died

Bulletproof School Backpacks...

                DeLuxe model with emojis and a charging port

School days, school days
Dear old shooting drill days
Coding and walkouts and smart pad functions
Taught to a federal court’s latest injunctions
You were my queen in tats (Day-Glo®)
I was your Trump at every gun show
You carved in my skin “i luv U ‘n’ Che Guevara so”
When we were a couple of latch-key kids




As of 3 August 2019 bulletproof backpacks were not on the approved list for the Texas Comptroller’s tax-free school supplies weekend; bulletproof vests are on the list as taxable (https://comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/publications/98-490/clothing-footwear.php).

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                 Election Night 2024: Dry Bones


                “All we are, basically, are monkeys with car keys”

    -Grandma Woody in Northern Exposure, “Animals R Us,” 1991


An early dusk falls under clouds from the Gulf
Yellow houselights wink on as daylight winks off
Supper in greasy bags from fast-fooderies
That everyone argues they can’t afford

Then like the lozenge in A Space Odyssey
A screen appears and dominates all
And family groupings center themselves around it
In excited cavortings before the images

Of brightly-colored cultic election scores
As fists swinging dry bones crush enemy skulls

Is there a God? And did He really build
This world for us in which to live and serve
Each other and Him in sweet caritas?

Is there a God? And does he really love us?

If this is so,

Why does He permit motivational speakers?

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

                  Do Dreams Fade Away at Dawn? Or Do We?

Do dreams beyond the dreamer dream
The imagined lands from deepest night
In which we live and seem to love -
Do they exist at morning’s light?

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As one of the blue-jacketed workers
As a defiant student
As a child of poverty
Who never had a bicycle to ride to the Sorbonne

I repudiate your vivid red flags
And your graduate-school keyboard revolution
And your catalogue of cliches’ and cant
And your crawling housefly symbolism

As one of the blue-jacketet workers
As a defiant student
After an all-night shift in the plastics factory
I like my cuppa Earl Grey tea in my bleeding hands

Someday I’ll have a bourgeois balcony
And from it look down on your stereotypes

Yes, Lady-in-the-Back-With-Your-Arms-Folded-in-Disapproval

“Excuse me.  Excuse me.  Could I ask a question?
Okay, I’ve got a question actually I’ve got
Two questions okay maybe it’s one question
I don’t mean to interrupt or anything

“Ha ha but sometimes us old folks don’t understand
So well ha ha but about what you said about
Just now what was it oh yes now I remember:
When I was young back in the stone ages

“Ha ha we were taught one way and right now
You’re telling us this way and that’s not right…”

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

                   “I am Going to Call for a Major Investigation…”

                             -Our Red Queen on Truth [sic] Social


In Wonderland a new oppressive conjuration -  
His name is Major Investigation
Sent at our screaming queen’s instigation
To drag us all down to her police station

Beginning with Kamala, Oprah, and Bono
For somewhat disapproving of him – oh, no!
The Major will punish their laissez-majesto -
In the name of freedom their heads must go!

(But of course the irony in all this biz
Is that their heads are even larger than his)

Old Number Ten Saloon – where Bill was shot
Sitting in this old chair – or maybe not
‘Cause down the street there is another bar
Where poor Bill died; that’s two beer joints so far

And yet a third, here in South Dakota
Right over there, behind that Toyota
Another of those authentic places
Where Wild Bill died over his eights and aces

Everyone has a different tale to tell

And so

We’re not real sure where Wild Bill Hickok fell

-headline

          And how can man die better
          Than facing fearful odds,
          For the ashes of his fathers,
          And the temples of his gods

                         -Macauley, Lays of Ancient Rome

An argument over a parking space –
Lest all the pink Chinese flip-flops are gone
Triple-wide thongs in naughty, frothy lace
And a rhinestone case for a new MePhone

Cartoon shirts from the Vietnamese, sippy cups
Nicaraguan underwear and funny hats
Squeaky plastic toys for the little pups
And genuine autographed tee-ball bats -

There are causes for which a man might die
But “Ten Percent Off!” is no battle cry

A young mother cradles her broken child
Amid the fragments of her world, her soul.
Blood drips.  Rain-sodden insulation drips.
Stillness between storms.  The trees are all gone.
A dark Sargasso Sea of shattered wood,
Bricks, clothes, books, toys, rags, glass, papers, bodies.
In the gasping heat the rot begins now.
No houses.  No lights.  A helicopter
Floating valley boys with plastic boxes
Taking cruel pictures and O-My-Godding
For the telescreen (between soda ads).
And in fortresses of personal affronts

(Safely far away)

Keyboard commandos leap into inaction:

People who choose to live there deserve it.
We told you that global warming is true.
We didn’t have these things ‘til they kicked Jesus
Out of these here schools. And paddling, by God.
It’s Obama’s fault.  Or is it George Bush?
It’s the Republicans. Public schools. Gaia.
British Petroleum.  Coal.  SUVs.
Suburbs.  Not reading the Bible.  Comets.
You’re stupid. Well eff you back.  Eff you more.

While in the second lowering line of storms
A young mother cradles her broken child.

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                 Puppies Share Christmas in Their Own Special Way

Nothing says Christmas like sparkly glitter
Frosting the ornaments and, oh! So much more
Tiny stars shared from an incontinent critter -
In diarrheal doggy **** on the bedroom floor!

Ouroboros

Writhing about in man’s mythologies
Is a completeness, itself to affirm
Scriven in the ancient cosmologies:
The self-ordained perfection of The Worm

The Samsara of the self-seeking soul
And a self-admiring self-causation
Itself entire, a universal whole
Devouring its tail in auto-phagation

But metamorphoses have come to pass:
The endless worm’s head is now up its own (self)

After Their Divorce

In his garage he takes a break, and sits
Among all the mechanical debris
Of an inventor born a century late:
Unsorted hopes, tools, dreams, and engine parts

The project car that he and his son will never
Rebuild together on Sunday afternoons
An old guitar, an ashtray full of ends
A midden of beer cans crushed in memories

He should be loading his truck and trailer, but
In his garage, in bitterness, he waits

Alexandria in a Seabag

The barracks is a university
So too the march, the camp, the line for chow
McKuen shares our ham and lima beans
John Steinbeck helps with cleaning guns and gear

(You’re not supposed to call your rifle a gun)

The Muses Nine are usually given a miss
But not Max Brand or Herman Wouk
Cowboys and hobbits and hippie poets
And a suspicious Russian or two

Tattered paperbacks jammed in our pockets:
All the world is our university

For Thomas V. Morris and William J. Bennett
In gratitude for a wonderful summer at Notre Dame



O, thou dry Jansenist! A night of fire
Left in your pocket like a shopping list
Sitting quietly in a room, will never burn
To set your sere and withered soul alight

And one might wager that your calculator
In brass, for counting brass, touches not the heart
Which has its reasons which the mind knows too
Pensees which never make a night a day

Forgive thou, then, this lettre provinciale
And count it as a friend’s memorial

Simon and Schuster assure me that I
Will be consumed by J. R. Ward’s new book
But I am neither steak nor apple pie
And probably would be difficult to cook

-headline

What’s important?



Young lovers soaring through a Neverland night
Savouring each other in sweet delight

4,000 More Light Casualties

A group of journalists arrived from Moscow and were told that the Afghan National Army…had taken the ridge. (They) were posing for victory photographs while our soldiers lay in the morgue.

-Svetlana Alexeivich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

A touchy old man who never went to war
Now poses with his decorative generals  
In their tailored Ken-and-Barbie battle dress
All prepped for combat in the officers’ clubs

New president, same as old presidents
And generals, awarding each other medals
And promotions for their golden resumes’
For sending not-their-children off to die

While they prosper on defense industry bids,
Afghanistan is the graveyard of our kids

(Shhhhhhhhhh…Don’t disturb Congress; they’re all asleep.)

Some have said that the bravest thing we do
Is to get up each morning and face the dawn
It may be so. The light is grey and cold
There seem to be no reasons to go on

And yet - the morning sun begins to kiss
The sensitive, delicate springtime leaves
Turning their own hopes to the morning sun
Stretching their chloroplasts awake to life

So even as sunlight embraces the tree
So maybe there will be kisses - we’ll see!

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                     The High Priest Kisses King Herod’s (Hands)

                         His Eminence the Cardinal of New York

The High Priest kisses King Herod’s (hands)
And joins him for a feast of mockeries and lies
Giving the tyrant for his crimes a pass
Laughing at Truth as civilization dies

Over lobster and beef they pity the poor
While robed in white ties and evening gowns
And silken ecclesiastical couture
(One of them has visions of papal crowns)

Gluttony and scorn at a rented manse -
All that is missing is Salome’s dance

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

                              The Dachshund and the ‘Possum

I let the dog out for her night patrol
To sniff the boundaries and take a stroll

But out in the dark, beyond the cat
That was where an old ‘possum was at

The dachshund stiffened; she was filled with rage
She charged the enemy; she snarled, “ENGAGE!”

I commanded the dachshund to let it go
With bark and bite and snap her answer was “no”

The fierce dachshund growled; the old ‘possum hissed
I grabbed for the dog but obviously missed

I went back inside to take a shower
Thinking to give the stupid dog an hour

And so it passed; her allotted time is up
The standoff continues ‘tween ‘possum and pup

At dawn it may be that one is dead –
I’ll find out then; for now I’m off to bed!

I Spy with my Little FBI

I spy with my little bright FBI
A government wet and hung out to dry
On clotheslines that might (or might not) be tapped
Through circuitry that the Soviets mapped

And passed the plans on to bad Vladimir
(Who wrestles tigers sans shirt and sans fear)
But, sure, that mighty hyperborean
Had better watch for the North Korean

And keep him closer than a dodgy brother

because

All we Yanks do is snoop on each other

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

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(Can anyone who spells “health care” as “healthcare”
Be trusted with anything?)

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                             Did You Grow Up in a Palace Too?

                               In Memory of the Palace Theatre

If you were fortunate you grew up in a palace
A Technicolor palace where Robin Hood
Saved England for only twenty-five cents
And the royal feast was popcorn and RC Cola

If you were fortunate you grew up in a palace
Which was so big that the Comanche Nation
Could encircle both a fort and a wagon train
And a candy bar was chuck-wagon stew

If you were fortunate you grew up in a palace
And softly, sweetly found another’s hand
As the cowboys and Indians rode away in peace -
There was a newer magic for you to discover

If you were fortunate you grew up in a palace
In the summertime of your happy youth

Children shot daily despite our stern laws
But at least they are safe from plastic straws

Children shot daily, caught in street-gang fights
But at least they are safe from 100-watt lights

Children shot daily, high death rankings
But at least they are safe from parental spankings

Children shot daily, murdered by crooks
But at least they are safe from The Little House books

Children shot daily, may God bless their souls
And too our regulated toilet bowls

Truck Stop Restroom Cologne

Denny’s / Flying J, Orange, Texas

Check out the boom-chick in the parking lot -
Love and diesel fumes are in the air.
Tattoos and cigarettes, oh, man, she’s hot!
Industrial peroxide tints her hair
Like rainbows in a toxic fuel-oil spill.
Her waist is a rockin’ forty-four,
A pavement Venus posed before the grill
Of a Peterbilt outside the truckers’ store.
How can the lovestruck swain lure her to his cab?
Persuade her to give him her innocent all?
A ripped-shirt display of a manly ab?
Wait - what’s that machine on the restroom wall?

Cool dude, you’ll never have to truck alone
If you scent yourself with restroom cologne.

Corpses for...

                      If any question why we died,
                 Tell them, because our fathers lied.

                                       -Kipling

Drones fall like broken promises upon
The burning decks while errant missiles fly
From sea to murky sea keeping the peace
Of headless bodies bobbing in the surf

Our leaders’ wars are yeah-boy video games
(With single-malt) across a shiny screen
But workers’ wars are blood and dirt and death
And “Thank you for your service” (now go away)

The good die young, so do the bad, but not
The sons and daughters of our nomenklatura

Oh, foolish Catullus – have you not heard?
Your lover Lesbia gave you the bird!

Pomona dances among the apple trees
Light-footed through the glowing amber light;
At dusk, kissed by the last rain-drops, the breeze
Begins to sigh, and falls, to sleep the night.

And then pale Cynthia, in silver crowned,
Rises to breathe upon each leaf and flower
Her sacred mists, softly and softly around,
And blesses dreams through many a silent hour.

Bold Helios will wake the sleeping east
And laugh away the magic of the dark;
He sets out daylight as a merry feast
And measures out his work with compass and arc

But later, them, for sweet Pomona’s play
Now celebrates the golden end of day.

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We print free verse about revolution
And deconstructing colonialism
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Sergeant Schultz Saw Everything

This sad world needs another Sergeant Schultz
That merry miles ponderosus who
Carried his rifle like a walking stick
And celebrated strudel instead of glory  
His innocent joy repudiated
The burning-soul ******* of war
In seeing nothing he saw everything
Through ordinary men living in hope
The liturgy of daily happiness -
This sad world needs another Sergeant Schultz

A line cook at Denny’s (must have own pans)
Is an artist, accomplished in assemblage
Compositions of eggs (rather like Cezanne’s)
Toast, bacon, waffles for his decoupage

His gesso is the window layered in steam
Built of reflections and condensation
Hinting at the flowing Interstate stream
Beyond the No Smoking pumping station

The line cook has indeed his pans and plans -
Art, as the muse of cookery commands

An urgent message that was never written
Was then not left beneath the third lantern
On an arching bridge that was never built
Under a wondrous river that never flowed

And men wondered at the unwritten words
They could not find atop the fourth lantern
In an echoing tunnel never dug
Over the steppes east of an eastern shore

And the message never written did not say:
O prelates and presidents – for whom do you pray?

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                    Twent­y Three But Not Me

I am told I have 26 new kin
How sad that I will never get to meet them
23andMe has tossed me into the bin
Access has been blocked through someone’s whim:

My information is open for hackers to see
But it’s certainly not open for me!

Avant-garde post-modernism ego
Futurism symbolism acme
Ism constructivism cosmopol
Itanism formalism neo

Formalism futurism imag
Inism proletarian real
Ism absurdism maximalism

Socialist realism, nothingism -
Poetic beauty, in spite of the Isms

That Happy Little Dachshund Dance

All dachshunds dance their days in happiness
And shake their bodies, tails, and ears about
And thank their humans every doggie day
With puppy kisses and yappings of joy:

          For cats to chase, for beds to muss
          For grassy lawns on which to play
          Hoovers to bark – oh, what a fuss!
          And your pillow at the end of day

For dogs still live in Eden, and that is why
All dachshunds dance their days in happiness

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

                       Has All the Gold Been Stolen from Fort Knox?

                     Elon Musk encouraged to crack open Fort Knox
                     and audit the gold reserves

                           -New York Post, 16 February 2025

President Musk will now make an audit
Of the gold in Fort Knox, down to the dime
But all he will find (he may have already caught it)
Is the missing TP from the covid time!