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
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                    President Musk and His Five Bullet Points

I was a federal employee in Viet-Nam
(More than five bullets and mortar bombs)
No one in Washington demanded I document my day
Or offered to send me home early with eight months’ pay

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

                               Prien Lake, November 2020

Waterfowl honk, quack, sing, and fish
Among floating insulation and foam
Near to the foundered wreckage of a boat
Along the shore, where sits a plastic chair

A discount-store throne in isolation
Set forth in rich, primeval mud where live
The little creatures whose logical end
Is in a fish or in a gumbo dish

A hurricane of hours is sorrow for years
In ancient, endless work, and occasional tears

Pale Prince Myshkin keeps vigil in a room
In which two aspects of civilization repose:
That which is dying, and that which is dead
That which is cold, and that which is very cold

The wounded healer waits, because he was asked
And harrows there the darkness with his light
He waits with the dead in a rented room
And on a hill, beside a waterfall

A keeper of souls for an appointed time
And his own is kept by Somebody Else

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

                                 Prince William Sans Culotte

            Prince William, Duchess Katherine, and the Children
                                   Pose for a Christmas Snap

Is the reason for pants minus
That a pair of trousers itches?
Oh, please, Your Royal Highness -
Put on your britches!

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.)

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

                                     ­              A Soup

A soup is just a little can of soup
Available in the prison commissary
A little warmth to get you through the night
If there is anything in your account

A little jar of powdered instant coffee
Available in the prison commissary
A ceremony of innocence, as Yeats would say
If there is anything in your account

And wakefulness at 0200, a hope -
If there is anything in that account

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, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                   Prisoners Working in the Early Morning Rain

We have all worked in the rain – building fences
Getting up the cows for milking twice a day
Sloshing through the muck to make deliveries
And usually with some choice in the matter

Prisoners have choices too – cells or a work detail
In designer costumes with horizontal stripes
Not much of a choice, but the work is needful and good
Picking up the litter of freedom and patching the road

Through the wipers I wave. They wave back. Rain -
We have all passed by our fellow man in the rain

Whatever might a performance tea
                                                           be?
Whatever are electrolytes to you
                                                           and me?
No antioxidants will ruin our night
                                                           all right?
And hydration is itself a fright
                                                          ­ Quite!

Blowing sleet rattles against the window pane
And the electrics have again winked adieu
But light the gas and brew up, black and plain
We’ll drink our tea by candles, with a biscuit
                                                         ­  or two

In nice China cups, or a mason jar

Because

The best tea of all is a cuppa char

(Upon reading a ‘vert for specialty teas)

Prologue to The Canterbury Downloads

There is a pilgrimage which no one plans
For youth and age, across a room, a poem
Sending each other ordinary English words
One by email, the other by Pony Express

Some journey to Canterbury to pray
To God at good Saint Thomas Becket’s shrine
Some to the Burgate for a coffee shop
And texting over a mocha “The droghte of March”

One asks about the rising middle class
Of a lad who hasn’t a date for the prom

Tollite vobiscum verba, et convertimini ad Dominum

-Osee 14:3 1

Provide yourself with words, with magic words,
And like Old Väinämöinen 2 sing them
Into the air, the wild, clean air, those words
Sing all that’s Good and Beautiful and True

The Sampo 2 of your mind spins not out flour
Nor salt nor gold, but needful thoughts and songs
In words that sing and sail beyond the sun
And back into that Founding whence they came

Write, then, the Good, the Beautiful, the True
And let God write them back again to you



1 Osee / Hosea
2 The Kalevala

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

      People Who Give Children Jack Chick Tracts for Halloween


    Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?

                                          -Saint Matthew 7: 9


If someone gives your child a Jack Chick
That is not a well-intentioned mistake
He is giving your child bigotry and fear
Hellish hatred, existential despair

If someone gives your child a Jack Chick
He is giving your child demons to haunt her dreams
Crude visions of sin to blight her happiness
His own satanic fears to destroy her hopes

If someone gives your child a Jack Chick
He is telling her that Jesus judges her ******

How bad does a candidate have to be
          To lose to Mr. Trump
How bad does a candidate have to be
          To lose to Mr. Biden
For four long years our country
          Has decayed in a dump
For the next four years
          I might go into hidin’

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!

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

                                         Pushing the Envelope

What envelope is being pushed?
From whom to whom – across the room?
And why should it be pushed at all?
Is the envelope an English A-1?
An American business-size?
A birthday check for someone to steal?
Pushing a broom, pushing a sale
Pushing a pen – some sense in those
But what is the purpose in pushing
An envelope?
                               And did you stamp it?

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

                                     Pushkin the Poetic Cat

Long, lean, and lanky, he slithers like a snake
In blue-grey fur; he makes the mousies quake

But I haven’t seen him in several days
He roams the woods and fields, he hunts, he strays

He’s proud and brave, my handsome Russian Blue -
Did he cross claws with a treacherous Chartreux?

Did they exchange hisses at just ten paces
Does his little corpse lie in wild snowy spaces?

I hope his life hasn’t ended like that
For I very much miss my dear little cat

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

                 Put Down the Rosary and Step Away from It

           Police interrupted a Catholic mass in Australia on Thursday
          after they received a tip that some parishioners may be
          violating a COVID-19 mask mandate

          -Police stop church service to make sure parishioners are
           wearing masks (msn.com)

Police have bravely raided a church in Perth
Some old folks at prayer on a Thursday night
Acting on a serpent’s tip (for what that’s worth)
Thus giving the wicked a righteous fright

Advance, Australia, thou land of the free!
Where prayerful insolence will be suppressed
And by the way, how much was the Judas-fee?
(Thirty Woolworth’s gift cards?)
We would want a snake to have only the best

One doubts this was only about some masks
What other reasons might there be? one asks

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

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

                                      Q is a Letter in the Alphabet

And that’s pretty much it, between P and R
Our teachers made us carve it as a curvy 2
Which is illogical because no one
Then wrote about 2uadrilaterals or 2ueens

A Q is not a Delphic Oracle
Nor is it The Lost Transistor of Mars
Whispering Barsoomian secrets in code
Transmitted through albino Calvinists

Q is a letter in the alphabet -
And we are rational children of God

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

                                                         Q

Where they go one, they go all
Just like sheep in a rented U-Haul
(Bah, bah, bah!)

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

               Quatrain on the Death of a Cow-Hippie Head-Banger

He was good. And I miss him. His funny hair
His high-intensity eyes, his love for life
The way his guitar was made a part of him
The heart of him, each chord a gift to God

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                      Quatrain on the Topic of Public Executions

On a wide-screen TV made in China
Americans scream for the deaths of Jews
And public executions for people they don’t like
Alabama kills humans with poison gas

Quinquagesima Sunday

The old rites are not old at all: Each is:
     A golden Hour hidden in ordinary time
     A tree hidden behind another tree
     A jewel lost in a desperate flight
     A chalice stolen by a thoughtless thief
     A book of truth banned by the occupation
     A solitary flower in a slough
     A happy thought unspoken behind the wire
     An Altar whose candles await the Light
The old rites are not old at all. They are.

19 January 2024, Friday in the second week in Ordinary Time

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                           Quomodo Catholici inter se Loquuntur?

Scortillum, scortillum, scortillum!
(Catholic news sites - I’ve had my fill of ‘em)

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

                  Quomodo Est Imperatoris Golf Ludi Hodie?

One sees the Senators cringing before Caesar
But lording themselves over the citizens of Rome
Putting a polish on their resumes’ and their nails
And checking out the cute new dancing girls

Truth is whatever Caesar decrees this week:
The Goths and Britons have signed an eternal peace
The border with Egypt is now secure
The price of wheat is down, as you can see

Thus the Senate proclaims:

Citizens of Rome!

You may not die of starvation in our streets
Lest you put our fat nobles off their sweets!

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

                                     Rachel Weeping for her Children

This is spring

There should be inattention in class:
Summer plans for camping and for play
When each sunny day is a barefoot day
Splashing in the stock pond, annoying the cows

Instead of

Chain-link fencing, sagging gates, gunfire
Black rifles, screams, ambulances in lines
Yellow plastic tape, detailed narratives
Telephoto camera lenses, MePhones

And tiny little bodies plastic-wrapped
Carried one by one to refrigerated vaults


(Hey, stud, preach to them about your Second Amendment)

Rachel, Weeping for Our Children

From an idea suggested by Kelly Rogers

No soldiers come, with glaring eyes, with death
To drag our children out into the road
To ****** away their lives into the dust
With pilum, gladius, or manly fist

No Romans as advisors standing by
Amid obscenities, curses, and screams
A fog of witness for that old excuse:
It’s all about the quality of life

Confusion now persuades with soft, soft breath
And therapists come, soothingly, with death.

Rachel, Weeping for Our Children

From an idea suggested by Kelly

No soldiers come, with glaring eyes, with death
To drag our children out into the road
To ****** away their lives into the dust
With pilum, gladius, or manly fist

With Romans as advisors standing by
Amid obscenities, curses, and screams
A fog of witness for that old excuse:
It’s all about the quality of life

Confusion now persuades with soft, soft breath
And therapists come, soothingly, with death.

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                     Racism is Popular with All the Cool Kids

Germany ‘would arrest Netanyahu if ICC issues a warrant’ (thetimes.co.uk)

Anti-Semitism again is all the rage
It’s a popular topic in the daily news
Indictments, lists, aktionen, and the barbed-wire cage -
Germany’s long tradition of arresting Jews

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

                                            Rain and Gasoline

                 Do you like the rain? Or do you think about it much?

                                               -Rod McKuen

Shoppers rattle their trolleys to their cars
An unexpected September thunderstorm
Splashes rain on the six-months-hot parking lot
Raising steam and hopes – will autumn ever come?

Thunderings rattle the ground and the air
From the service station up the concrete *****
Gasoline and diesel join the rivulets
In making iridescent the sloshing streams

Sale papers and cigarette ends float free
But only to the drains, not to the sea

The rain makes even concrete beautiful:
A drop, then two, and then a singing shower
Baptizing the pavement with little pools
That catch the lights and bounce them all about:

Street lights all golden, rippling up and down
And automobile lights slipping across
The other lights, interrupted by feet
Splashing and slipping all the wet way home

And you, dancing about in the puddles -
The rain makes even love more beautiful



(A brief look through the InterGossip does not show that “Rain Makes Even Concrete Beautiful” has been used as the title for a song or poem or other “spot of art” (as Bertie Wooster would say). If it has, please advise me so I can change it.)

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                      Rai­n Puddles and Children

                                             For Nora and Theo

Our boat-captain neighbor is home from the sea 1
(Okay, the Gulf of Mexico)
And this morning took his children for a walk
Along our road, and stopped to visit with me -
Nora watches and listens, but Theo loves to talk

Talktalktalktalktalktalktalktalktalktalktalktalk

He wildly rushes his sentences and words
Words piled in heaps - he has so much to say!
But Nora in silence celebrates flowers and birds
She sees whole worlds in puddles along the way

And into them Theo LEAPS!

We know this world is in a bit of a muddle
But when children splash through a rain-filled puddle

They make everything better




1 Cf. “Requiem,” Robert Louis Stevenson. The context is entirely different.

Long-fallen stars and quarrelling lords must wait
For seasons upon seasons to pass in flight
Seasons, and Feasts upon a Table set
Untasted by sleepers, and winged away

But, exiles, you may taste of mercy here
And you may taste forever of that Feast
If you are not afraid to hear the silence
Where out of time all healing will be given

If you can trust that which you cannot know -
Long-fallen stars and quarrelling lords will wait


1 C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

There once was a scoundrel, Rasputin
Whose diet was entirely free of gluten
          Since it was all whiskey and gin
          And big helpings of sin -
But he died from poison and shootin’

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                        Reader Responses in the U. K. Daily Mail

RepubliCraps. Demoncrats. Repugs. DemoCraps. MAGA. Magats. Maggots. Clown. Orange clown. Clowns. Clown show. Absolute clown show. Absolute ****** clown show. Diaper Joe. Dr. Potatohead. *****. Selected not elected. Deplorables. Trailer trash. Absolute trailer trash. Said no one ever. Oh wait. Lock her up. Lock him up. Throw away the key. Absolutely. Joebama. Drumpf. Dump. Woke. Wokista. Wokerati. Absolutely Woke. Biden’s America. Trump’s America. Mean tweets. No mean tweets. These teachers. These schools. These universities. TDS. Absolute TDS. Liberal idiots. Extremist idiots. Absolute idiots. ROFL. Grab some popcorn. …in 1, 2, 3…  Dumpster fire. Absolute dumpster fire. You can’t make this stuff up. Train wreck. Absolute train wreck. Car crash. Absolute car crash. Total car crash. The jokes write themselves. At its finest. Pure evil. Absolute pure evil. Cue crickets. Of biblical proportions. Of epic proportions. Of absolute epic biblical proportions. Rinse and repeat. Rules for thee but not for me. Two-tier justice system. Absolute two-tier justice system. You could look it up. Follow the science. Full stop. LOL. End of. Absolutely. Fact. FACT!!!!!

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


                            Reading is a Suspicious Activity:
                                Blue-Penciled in Solovetsky

   “…Soviet writers failed to write about their personal thoughts.”

                                               -Yevtushenko

Reading is a suspicious activity
Unless it’s a technical book of instructions
Or a hunting magazine with centerfolds
Of seductive semi-automatics

Writing is a forbidden activity
Unless it’s a grocery shopping list
Or the code to a new computer game
Of zombie valkyries with ******* tats

They’ve only gotten as far as statues thrown down
They’ll destroy the libraries next – and maybe you

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

           Reading the Magna Carta Will Make Us Smarter

                  (And it bans fish weirs in the Thames)

The Kings have been subject to the law since 1215
But are American presidents? That remains to be seen

The fresh death notices a reader eyed
“Who was this woman, who recently died?”
“My ex,” he replied, not breaking his stride
With bacon and eggs, and toast on the side

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

                                                 Reading the Room

I don’t know to read a room, but look –
I’m still pretty good at reading a book!

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                           Read Within Your Academic Discipline


                               The Child is father of the Man

                                             -Wordsworth


When I was a child I read without discipline:
Robert A. Heinlein, Robin Hood, cowboy yarns
Pirates raiding across the Spanish Main
Penrod and Sam, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn

In college they said, “Read within your discipline”
The Russians are good, Romantics if you must
Though the English are overstudied and overdone
(Some say electronics are the coming thing)

I minded the words of my college tutor
‘Til Robin Hood stole the Sheriff’s computer

Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                            Reality Will See You Now

I am a student of medical waiting rooms
The same Motel 6 paintings and decor
Receptionists giggling behind rippled glass
About weekends and boyfriends and inadequate husbands

Patients waiting as patiently as Russians
Tattoos and ball-caps lined up in plastic-chairs
Clutching bills and lab reports in nervous hands
Or greasy year-old copies of Reader’s Digest

Or bending over their MePhones in a servile bow -
“Mr. Hall? The doctor will see you now…”

Reclining **** with Pet Frog

Hobby Lobby got caught smuggling artifacts
Vaticanos got caught snuggling each other
Putin and Trump are loose with their facts
The governor of New Jersey is BIG Brother

The Republicans blame the Democrats
The Democrats blame the Russians
The Russians blame the plutocrats
And the Norks won’t join the discussions

All of them make big messes every day
And they expect us to shut up and pay

Reclining ****...

                        For a scribbler in that art magazine

             “…bodiless heads, green horses and violet grass,
             seaweed, shells and funguses...conventionally
             arranged in the manner of Dali.”

           -Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags, pp. 31-32

Making messes is but poor huswifery
Tie-dyeing creativity into
A finger-painting school of assemblage
Asymbol’d: “Reclining **** with Pet Frog”

In praise of working people and, like, stuff -
Your comrade cleaners whom you claim to love
Could tell you what a simp you are. They won’t
Because they need their jobs, dear precious ****

So, disappear your selfies into your ‘phone -
The 1960’s are over and gone

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

                                                Red, Red Wasps

Some sing of red, red wine, but here I sing
Of red, red wasps, who do not sing of me
I loathe and fear them for their vicious sting -
I aerosol their nest, and then I flee!

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

                                 Refilling the Hummingbird Feeder

Now here is a bee
So anxious for me    
                     to be
Far away from it

Is reality filtered through one’s culture
No longer reality? Or is it
That reality without a cultural filter
Is not reality at all, but only
An unobserved function of biology
Chemistry, geology, or radiation
Whose purpose is unknowable because
Without the perception of God or man
It doesn’t exist

And neither does the snake, which might have been
But then, maybe it is Schrodinger’s snake
Or was
Or might be

They say that the first cultural bias you ****
Is the most difficult, that it becomes
Easier after that. But it isn’t so.

After a hard life along existential trails
Of assumptions examined to dust, you want
To put away your Hegelian dialectic
And settle down in a little cottage
In the country with a few good books, a garden,
And Aristotle’s unities, but there’s
Always a young concept-slinger who thinks
He’s faster on the synthesis than you
And calls you out on your legendary denial
Of the knowability of objective reality

For the rest of your life (but do you exist?)
No matter how carefully you sharpen your syllogisms
Somewhere out there in the darkness it lurks:
An ontological proposition with your name on it

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

                         Reliable InterGossip Service Providers

                            This one is dedicated to Spectrum

Don’t tell me that they are unreliable
All of my providers have been quite precise
Sure, the picture and sound are not often viable
But the bills are always on time – how nice!

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

                                     Remembering Rod McKuen

But of course some are vituperative – they aren’t him
The young still read his books, discreetly now
Because he isn’t cool in this unhappy time
The old still read his books – he saved their youth

But of course some are vituperative – they aren’t you
The young will read your books someday and know
That you have captured on paper their lives
And they will give their hearts freely to you

I hear that you are thinking of giving up poetry
You shouldn’t, you know – because while it is true
That you have a gift, you should always remember
That you are a gift, and the young need you

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

               “Remember, Remember, THIS Fifth of November”

Guy Fawkes is lurking beneath the assembly again
Barrels of resentments all set to scorch
Same plan, same plot, same ploy, same wicked grin
But this time there is no one
                                                       to take away his torch