Avuncular in his style, jolly and loud
An epiphany with an entourage
Of functionaries who survey the crowd
For any lack of enthusiasm

Applaud they must, wearing upon command
Cheap slogan tees averring that their school
Is like totally awesome and ‘way cool
They leap and bounce and cheer as they are told

Chanting a theme, this year’s predictable theme
Desperately cute, a motivational meme -
Oh, those childish, subservient creatures!
The worst part is that they are the
                                                             ­      teachers

The old order changeth, yielding place to new

-Tennyson, Idylls of the King

Like dinosaurs our institutions gasp
In spasms of existential death; they pass
At first unnoticed by the casual unobserver
Who trips over a covenant that isn’t there

If you vote they give you a sticker

The ephemeral Constitution changed
Like sweaty skivvies by each president
Law libraries catalogued for pulp
By obedient functionaries in tees

If you vote they give you a sticker

The faithful escorted out of the cathedral
By a bored security guard on overtime
The altar linens for sale at Goodwill
And the sanctuary repurposed on T.V.

If you vote they give you a sticker

Some of The Just Plain Folks cheer for the Reds
And the others cheer only for the Blues
As the reincarnation of Jack Chick
Blesses their four-wheelers and plastic caps

If you vote they give you a sticker

Election placards on abandoned buildings
Promise again prosperity for all
The **** lab cooks behind The Kute Kidz
Private Academy of the Dance and Math

If you vote they give you a sticker

An outreach of the Bright Light Free Will
Missionary Temple of the Lord Jesus Christ
Of the Lamb Sanctified 501C The Reverend Doctor Master Bishop Billy-Bob Hairdo PhD, DD a-brangin’ Messages and His Esteemed Lady Apostle Heather

If you vote they give you a sticker

And blessed be the Holy AR-15
God gave to His People to defend themselves
Here in the freest country in the world
Which you can find behind the barbed-wire fence

If you vote they give you a sticker

While fleets of luxury presidential jets
Arc high over our public housing projects
Reminding us of our prosperity
Here in the richest country in the world

If you vote they give you a sticker

And them Jews for Jesus I guess they’re all right
But them other Jews they just ain’t no good
Nor them Cath’lics nor them Mormons neither
And don’t you get me started on them Baptists

(We seem to have been otherwise engaged)

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new” –
(But neither cares at all for me or you)

But if you vote they give you a sticker

friends of friends and an **** of mutuality
every one ripe for the ******* until we greedily
eat our own tails

I find myself running low on chemistry

with so little reaction left inside of me
the water around the plug hole no longer spins,
it only falls

architectural wounds
cannot heal beneath this razor’s murderous haste
while the cognisant weak and a capella apes deform
the silent comedy of a shared space

once straight tempers and scorpion kindness highball
an unhappy taste, leaving who to speak
for the ordinary host?

the functionaries’ short practice
infects the martyr’s hurried hair
between the principal route and the settling irons

perhaps we do not wish to admit,
that the majority of the words we speak,
the conversations overheard, even without intent,
leave us not awash, not suffocating, but
mesmerized in an awful way

squelching tirades of banality,
humdrum housework life's tirades of
meeting basic needs, functionaries of life,
bureaucrats of our domestic affairs,
accountants calculating marginal cures,
overridden by the occasional impulse,
which delights until it too
is humdrum-ed out of existence

a passing blazing ambulance
begs to contradict,
reminders that there are
crevasses on the city streets,
that in minuscule moments,
life becomes twisted making our lethargy,
a course 101 introduction to tragedy

but this is not the norm,
this imbalanced equation,
1X = 99 whys,

to survive,
to justify,
to mediate
between these un-counterbalanced weights,
I write poetry

Ill-lettered functionaries at PBS
Are pleased to announce that Woodstock defined
A generation. In reality,
Generations are not defined at all:

My argument is that women and men
Of conscience, courage, character, and class
Define themselves, and stubbornly refuse
To be counted, conned, or categorized

And only followers would acquiesce

To

Ill-lettered functionaries at PBS

I have no energy left but for revolt — the revolt of the one who abandons the climb, turns his back, and goes back down the hill toward the water.

**** Cheney ate my flesh and shat upon my skeletal remnants. Obama came after him, unzipped his fly and emptied the pale dilution of his bladder-wine onto me (it was warm and sparkling at first, but soon became cold and fetid).

I do not want to be treated by your white-robed functionaries who take me to the precipice’s edge, deliver a pill to my mouth, a hand in my pocket, and a push on my back. I do not want to be educated by your masters of delusion, your demons of standardized measurement. I do not want to be fed by your factory corpses who sit like workers in cubicles, unmoving and covered to their hips in excrement and despair. I do not want to be employed by your treadmill machines that turn time into regret and obedience into tears. I do not want to be informed by your chyron streams that feed the wells of desolation and ignorance. I do not want to be a part of your economy that fills the fountains of palaces with the blood of innocence, where investment is a tout sheet that dissolves into electrons as the getaway limousine races toward the mansion.

The sheer and final exhaustion of the rebel is his last and only triumph: he drops the knife of his cause, gently lowers the stiffening body of his holy purpose into the receptive dust, clears aside a few stony pieces of the rubble, and kneels in submission to the earth and all the teeming beauty that lies beneath it.

For then he knows: it is I, too, like these others, who have walked among the dead.

They walk—no, more likely, they saunter,
Embassy functionaries, associate profs at G-Dub,
A smorgasbord of polka dots and vitae,
Leopard-print and Linkedin pages,
Sufficent and necessary in their presents and futures.
I occupy a bench in my own shambling manner,
Denim-clad most days,
Perhaps affecting a less humble khaki
If I am feeling particularly grandiloquent,
Redeployed here from more rough-and-tumble of more avenues,
Among the bar-and-concrete hosteled llamas and coyotes
(Probably closer kin, if one is being honest)
Simply an ornamental thing, overgrown garden gnome
Or bowdlerized lawn jockey, unobtrusive and unnoticed
By those who would coo at the macaos and mandarin ducks
Or shudder at the offal left uneaten by black bears and maned wolves.
And so such days proceed, from my convenience-store coffee arrival
To such time that something approximating dinner
Must be conjured or cadged from somewhere,
My thoughts tend to stray not to the lionesses
Nor sleek Catwoman-esque jaguars,
But to the unpretentious turkey vultures of the fields of my youth,
Circling warily, inexorably in threes and fours above
And I know there is neither ennobling nor annihilation to find here,
No outcome but to simply await.

Can we think old thoughts as thought by earlier readers,
without walling a mind off from all we know,
which Hobbes had no way of learning,
though? No.
We need this knack of we being, a you and a me, seeing
an I, in a time long ago.

Egalitarian sortings of men, arrogation worth,
a-dam, novus knower,
acknowledge me your equal? Dare ye, I may be a fool.
Levelers were around, in Hobbes's town, taking time
to bring the highest minded down,
not to lift the baser sort up.

-- none the less, lime the branch,
-- by chance a bird may bring a word, watch

we heard, the deceived received a reprieve,
we've found the edge stitched in
second thoughts and other wise guesses as good,
good enough
to keep life as we have agreed, conserving
the power in the
word - life as in -- we live, not me without you or we
without all the otherwise functionaries,
maintaining the planet and aching
to settle down to day and night,
just right.

Balance in being part of it all,
restored,

for a second there, didjafeel it?

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

                                        The War on Books

          The war on books, codified by Stalin’s functionaries
          at the Soviet Writers’ Conference in 1934 and ruthlessly
          waged by the secret police for the following fifty years,
          was finally coming to an end, and Zhivago’s insurgent
          guerrillas were winning.

                             -Duncan White, Cold Warriors:
                    Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold war

What books will America purge this week -
What childhood adventures, what scholarly works
What entertainments of an idle hour
Will be forbidden to us in this Land of the Free?

We pray that nations blessed with liberty
Will smuggle books to us, stories and poems
With innocent ideas that give delight
And in their innocence threaten tyrants

What books will America purge this week –
And when did we become afraid of ideas?

We read that all functionaries in the Moscow Kremlin use typewriters and messengers for in-house communications.

Typewriters cannot be hacked.  The cleverest listening devices aboard lurking submarines and in space spy craft can pick up the tap-tap-tap of a typewriter, but cannot interpret an e-tap from a g-tap.

Better still, typewriters break down only every twenty years or so.  No typewriter sends you a message that the Microsoft Word lifetime package you bought has no existence, and that you must buy it again, nor does it give you a blue screen because it has no screen at all. A typewriter tells you nothing; you tell the typewriter with the nimbleness of your mind and fingers, and it obeys.

Beyond that, one does not imagine Vladimir Putin passing idle evenings playing Candy Crush. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia crush, maybe.

A computer, any computer, unlike the manly typewriter, often suffers the Aunt Pittypat vapors and falls into a faint, calling weakly for smelling salts.

Thus the brevity of this column.

Y'r 'umble scrivener has spent much of a beautiful spring day attempting to coax Aunt Pittypat into waking up and doing a little work:

But all Microsoft's horses (I was thinking of another quadruped, but the name is not appropriate for a family newspaper)

And all Microsoft's persons

Could not make Aunt Pittypat anything but worsens. (That's not a real word)

A personal computer is outdated before you get it home from the Godzilla Box Store, and this moribund machine is some four years old. In dog years that is...something; I forget what.

Tomorrow morning I am off to buy the cheapest machine I can find, for personal computers are as disposable as toilet paper.

I will pass another beautiful spring day re-installing programs and apps (because I am good about backing up all my files) and addresses and all the tiny little dragons that speed along its circuits, and by next week should have a brilliant and well-crafted story to tell you.

May your electrons never fail.

-30-

STEMinists

That women must be as shallow as men
And thus surrender all their high estate:
Art, music, government, medicine, law
Science, literature, administration

To be programmed, obedient to machines
That turn, tilt, twist, light up and make noises
Measure this, adjust that, obey, obey
Functionaries in a factory – why?

To bow before gadgets, just like the men -
The old Eden thing, all over again

Bow down to the man
suit and tie briefcase in hand
fighting your last stand

                        Kelly McManus

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

                 The State of the Union and an Undisclosed Location

The truth is at an undisclosed location
That firm guardian of the Republic
Surrounded by functionaries and bodyguards
Blue-glowing screens set forth on polished oak

The truth is at an undisclosed location
And so am I, an old man musing his dreams
Surrounded by Yevtushenko and Shakespeare
Lord Byron, Shelley, Keats - Miss Marple too

The truth is at an undisclosed location
But we can discover it if we try

(Begin with the sale table at Barnes & Noble)

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

                             An Armada of Black Escalades

              …detailed lists of disloyal government officials

             -Inside Trump '25: A radical plan for Trump’s
                              second term (axios.com)

A shadow government just like
The new government just like
The previous government -
And just whose names are inscribed on Schedule F?

Those black Escalades

Armored Mariahs carrying functionaries
And their lists to secret meetings in the night
The Party faithful planning a new Lubyanka
And cultural suicide through electronic noise

Those black Escalades

The escort has a warrant for your obedience
You can see Siberia from the passenger seat

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                  A Synod on Synodality -
                                   What does that mean?


                    This Synod is intended as a Synodal Process. The aim of
                    this synodal process is not to provide a temporary or
                    one-time experience of synodality, but rather to provide
                    an opportunity for the entire People of God to discern
                    together how to move forward on the path towards
                    being a more synodal Church in the long-term.

                -https://www.synod.va/en/the-synod-on-synodality/what-
                 is-the-synod-about.htm


And let the people say: Huh?

Prelates and prince-prelates and princesses
Whose names are prefaced with gilded adjectives
Attend their meetings and cloud the ecclesiastical air
With catalogues of obscure polysyllables

But somewhere – somewhere in a little parish
Fading into a forest far from the highways
Or in an underfunded religious house
Along some decaying steel town’s crumbling streets
Poor brothers and sisters catch the morning bus
To nursing homes and migrant shelters and jails
To serve the drunks, the druggies, the ne’er-do-wells
The abandoned and lonely children of God

Because everywhere – the faithless and the faithful
Tangle with Satan in physical and emotional pain
In the ******, soul-shrieking hells of war
In petitioning faceless functionaries
For even a little help, a doctor’s appointment
A job, a meal, a bit of dignity
In the shadow of bishops flying first-class
And taking selfies in their playbox dressups

Prelates and prince-prelates and princesses
Exchange lecture notes and witty bon mots -
An outcast bypassed on the pavement dies
A knotted rosary tangled in her aged hands

Perhaps her last words were of synodality