Lawrence Hall HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                   Petite Bourgeois, Personal, and Self-Indulgent

                        I used to admire your poetry. I shouldn't admire
                        it now. I should find it absurdly personal. Don't you
                        agree? Feelings, insights, affections...it's suddenly
                        trivial now.

                   -Strelnikov to Yuri in Doctor Zhivago (film)

In the evenings I sit on my summer lawn
Slouched in an old, much-painted metal chair
That symbol of petite-bourgeois respectability
With a little table for my drink, my pipe, my book

(The cat pads by on errands of his own)

At dusk a friend or two might amble along
And join me for a glass, a smoke, a talk
We casually swat at mosquitoes and rumors
And argue about Doctor Zhivago and Lonesome Dove

(A fast-diving mockingbird mocks the cat)

In a fallen world of chaos and suffering
With fear of revolution in the air
Is it right to indulge ourselves with such trifles
As sitting and talking with old friends in the twilight?

Oh, yes

(The cat and the mockingbird continue their game)

Across the years, 400 plus, my stories endlessly play out their parts.
I played not on painted stage, but I knew the human heart - 
I captured, with quill and scratch, the passions of laughter and tears.
I held up a mirror, in doublet and verse, to things unbound by years,
like the weight of grief, the lightness of love and the serpents of ambition.
The music of verse, the lilt and fall of words, hold a strange enchantment,
brief spells where fools, princes, witches and kings shared a selfsame planet.
Though my bones lay in hallowed ground, the stories I spun linger yet.
They've played out, in age after age, on a thousand, thousand stages.
It’s well done, if I say so myself, to live on, in millions of minds and bookshelves.
.
.
A song for this:
Just Like Romeo and Juliet by The Reflections

I don’t know, I don’t care,
if you’re going to the party
or you won’t be there

I don’t give you a thought
you’re not on my mind
and if I ever think of you
I’m not very kind

Now that you’re gone
I’m feeling better
Now that you’re gone
I’ll feel that way forever

I laugh when I hear,
that you’re under pressure
or under the weather -
the last one is better

Look, I’m not irate -
and I haven’t any doubts
- you were like a bad taste,
that I had to spit out.

You proved a consternation,
a mistake on my part,
thanks again, LUzer
I actually learned a lot
.
.
a song for this:
Please Please Please by Sabrina Carpenter

(Inspired by Carlo C Gomez’s ‘The Lacemaker‘)

We’re manufactured girls,
designed to be beautiful and pointless.

Everything we tell you has to be true,
we feel we can open up to you.

We’re decorated and prepared for sacrifice.

We can touch your tender isolation
and reinforce your inadequate truths.

We can mirror your internal struggles
and help you shape your damnation.

You’ve caressed our powerless distress
a thousand times, with sleep's dark hands.

Don’t feel your destroying something beautiful

You know, when privately accessible
in the darkness of your man cave
our soft, immediate shapes
excuse extraordinary behavior.

That’s all we want.
.
.
A song for this:
Genesis. by RAYE

For want of the word
A thought is lost
For want of the thought
An idea is lost
For want of an idea
The plan’s unformed
Without any plan
My world is chaos
         ljm

so many once here
have now disappeared
long gone into the white

rambled and veered
on to paths unclear
faded from all sight

their bark was their bite
but this dark toothless blight
has quickly 'come revered

so we write
that we might be a light tonight
in lieu of the disappeared