You are a papercut,
An irritant in this life.
A sting to the tongue
When licking envelopes.
Insane like the crowd
Shouting, "Do it, do it!"
To the one on the ledge.
Your only goal, it seems
To be a harm to others,
Of which you succeed
Often and repeatedly.
Somehow, it makes you
Feel like a superior man.
But only shines a mirror
To your inferior interior.

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

               One Shouldn’t Complain – But I’m Going to Complain


           It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have
           been “had for a sucker”…but it would be a torment to know
           that (I) had refused even one person in need.

                               -C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady


Do you sometimes feel that you are on call
Twenty-five hours a day, on days you don’t even have
For all the needs and moods and whims and wants
Of clingy people who disapprove of you anyway?

When you come in from work, someone needs a ride
When you wake up at dawn, someone’s battery is dead
Someone needs a ten – could you make it a twenty?
And say, could you take my kid to school today?

For you The Golden Rule is a golden letter -
Still, everyone agrees, you could have helped them better

Words activate something in me
even if I’m just thinking, not writing.
So I soon find myself back at the keyboard.
It seems that my life’s been a series of keyboards.

My motor’s always running—I idle fast.
But I’ve been untying my intellectual shoe-strings recently.
Dissociatively avoiding intellective pursuits,
and embracing entropy (since school ended).
It’s been relaxing—I’ve felt new to my body.

There’ve been happenings lately,
particularly in the nocturnal theater of romantic nights.
My bf Peter’s here—trying to look impressed by an under-grad degree. He’s a pretty good actor—for an amateur.

We’ve been interrogating the richer aspects of love,
testing it’s configurations you might say,
with constant motions and lush indulgences.
We’re savoring this temporary freedom,
devouring it, like mindless carnivores.

Peter lives in Geneva, you see, while I’ve been in New Haven.
If I’ve learned anything, in my ivy league, senior year,
it’s that you can’t cheat closeness with virtuality.
He may have a new job in New Jersey and I'll be in Boston.
I've already calculated a year’s travel expenses from
Logan to Liberty and back 52 times = ~$62k. Make it so.

I'm an enumerator, I count everything
—the left facing croissants on a tray,
the days Peter and I have been apart,
and the modicum of hours we’ve had together.
I’m somewhere on that obsessive-compulsive bell curve,
and I’m a Libra, uncomfortable in an uneven world.
Perhaps there's no shame in this.

I wonder sometimes, when we’re separated, if we’ll still work, when
we’re reunited, and then, like sunlight can suddenly define shadow,
we can see that it does.
That love is more potent than wine.

I dream of things I can’t have—yet,
like the life I’d like to live—someday.
Hey, I’ve something to look forward to.
.
.
Songs for this:
Love Train by The O'Jays
Easy by The Commodores

You say I’m beautiful, I look away shy,
Like I’m still that girl, when you first caught my eye.
Your words, still electric, they flutter and burn,
And cheeks that should know better still blush in return.

You laugh and you tease, “Still crushing on me?”
I just grin and nod, ‘cause how could I not be?
The butterflies stayed, they never outgrew,
This love that still flutters, still flusters for you.

I never blamed you.
Never.
How could I?
you were everything...
I spent my days waiting for you
to walk up the drive

You will never know just how important you were
are
I feel like I'm little again
waiting for you to walk up the drive
I missed you more then I realized
I needed you in my life to survive

And for that, you could never be at fault.
Never.

I just needed you to know
I never blamed you.
Never.