Hark—nightingales sing songs of dawning spring.
The flitting bluejays banter in the trees.
A sparrow greets a dove, and both take wing,
While robins fight with cardinals. The breeze
Bears on its unseen currents feathered tribes:
The nutfinch mothers feed their new-hatched flocks.
Now crows appear: dark jesters squawking jibes;
The swooping blackbirds protest preying hawks . . .

Strangely, some younger birds attempt to moult
Confused in youthful avian revolt,
And cast off gender; ***** attempt to nest.
Chickadees chirp, proclaiming they are cats
And other fowl identify as bats.
(Their madness serves to entertain the rest.)

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

                                         Spectrum Cable 3

                                          For 24 April 2025

Spectrum stops working at the fall of a leaf
Such fragility! It beggars belief.

Without poetry, we'd all
be chained to fences of time.
locked in,
torn apart,
played with by the
cosmic dance.

Don't get me wrong,
the poems can't
cure cancer, or heal the
lame dog's leg.
But, they might give
the ****** hope, and the
hobos a home.

Poetry tricks the mind
into seeing things,
like woolfhounds with
bagpipes playing an
Irish jig, far away from
the ferryman and his ride
across the river.

Without poetry, about now,
my skull
would be a home for beetles
and worms, turning
ever so slowly into
dust.

We are slaves
to the techno-autocracy.
A faith of subscribing,
of retweeting,
of liking things
we never loved.

We chant into the feed
and call it presence.
We echo to the void
and call it voice.

The liturgy is noise.
The sacrament is scroll.
We kneel before timelines
like altar rails
and take communion in pixels.

We have traded prophets for influencers.
Revelation for reposts.
Scripture for screen time.

The holy ghost got a firmware update,
but still can’t answer support tickets.

We stare at our gods,
glowing in our palms,
and ask to be known—
but only if it fits in the caption.

There is no silence.
Only the dull roar of monetized despair.
The din that keeps us deaf.
The bombast of uninformed certainty.
The drivel that drips down our chin
while we think we’re being fed.

We are full of nothing,
and still we chew.

From the shattering came the still
It was a peace of sorts,
That dew caressed morning,
Songs of dawn chorus trill.

This world will turn without you,
The wind won't breathe your loss.
The silence will speak in volumes
Of dusty shelves that time forgot.

First we must remember,
And then we shall regret,
Crawling back toward the shadows
Beg the darkness, let us forget.

And so we never learn,
Sat at tables forever turning
Burning hunger never ends.

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

                  Together We Have All Suffered Nights on Weathertop

                                         Gratitude for Friends

We have suffered nights on Weathertop
Made a perimeter against bleak despair
Surrounded in the dark by yet more dark
Chilling us, choking us in miasms of fear

Shhhhh, shhhh – out there – THEY are here – they are HERE!
Confusion and terror, a poisonous blade
Hissings and terror, and deep-fouled temptations
And afterward through the years a deep-fouled pain

Each of us suffers a wound that never mends -
But by the grace of Elbereth we are all stout friends