THE PRESIDENT WRITES IN ALL CAPS - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

THE PRESIDENT WRITES IN ALL CAPS

The President is writing in ALL CAPS today
And that’s all right because caps are okay:
They keep his head warm in the winter’s cold
He has ‘em in colors: red, white, and gold

And an old one in green from Viet-Nam
Where he was a-serving 1 of his Uncle Sam
Only he didn’t, but that doesn’t matter
He’ll dodge the issue with bluster and natter

Be grateful he sports his red MAGA cap
To cover his head, ‘cause it’s full of

                                                                      hair



1 allusion to Kipling's "Gunga Din"

We've Always Sailed Among the Stars - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

We’ve Always Sailed Among the Stars

We’ve always sailed among the stars, for they
Do swim around us in their hemisphere
The sea’s a map whereon is writ the moon
In all her moods and whims and vanities

And too the sun, for he flies east to west
And so if we but trace his path across
To Sidon from the Pillars of Hercules
We calculate our course by his long wake

Oh, yes, we sail across the seas and skies -
But I would chart the starlight in her eyes

Quick - What's the First Line of the Chinese National Anthem? - column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Quick – What’s the First Line of the Chinese National Anthem?

In Grand Prairie a minor league baseball team known as the Texas Airhogs (Airhogs - I don’t get it either) rotates through its roster a number of China’s Shougang Eagles. https://www.star-telegram.com/news/nation-world/national/article215482305.html

Maybe baseball is the international language of peace and love and, like, stuff.

Does everyone stand for the Chinese national anthem?

In China, where due process is according to Legal Code 7.62 and where murdering prisoners is a national spectator sport, people probably do stand for their anthem. Or else. They probably also chant something like, “Hail, Faceless Committee Who Rule Us with an Iron Rod of Love and Progress!”

The chant doesn’t mention the Faceless Committee’s Rolex watches, yachts, Swiss bank accounts, Italian luxury cars, and personal airplanes. Everything for The People, bless them.

In the U.S.A. one is free not to stand for the national anthem, which is the best reason of all for choosing to stand.

In the bleachers at a Chinese baseball game a hot dog really is a dog, maybe a beagle, raised to farm-fresh ripeness and then slaughtered for a good ol’ down-home taste treat. “Hot dogs! Get yer hot dogs! This one was named Rover!”

“Buy me some dog bits and kitty snacks / I don’t care if I never get back…”

When Saddamn Hussein’s soccer team lost the players were beaten, as in beaten up, by Beloved Leader’s security services. One wonders if that’s also true in China.

Outside the U.S. embassy in Beiping / Peking / Pekin / Beijing last week a fellow set off a bomb but wasn’t able to get away from it – that was a swing and a miss.

A schoolmate’s father, Douglas Dove, of happy memory, loved to attend his grandsons’ high school baseball games. Mr. Dove, like Katie Casey in the song about Cracker Jacks, was occasionally displeased with the rulings on the field, and offered his spectacles to the officials with a good and loud “You want my glasses, ump!?”

That’s the American way. God bless Mr. Dove and the great game of baseball.

-30-

One Mustn't Keep a Sensitive Executioner Waiting - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

One Mustn’t Keep a Sensitive Executioner Waiting

“You are your own god – and are surprised when you find

that the wolf pack is hunting you across the desolate ice fields of winter.”

― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

Crazy old men bellowing at each other
Crazy old women shrieking at us all:
The Spiritus Mundi is hard at play
Among the wreckage of civilization

The stripping of the altars 1 is complete
Holy innocence is a toilet joke
And the literature of millennia
Now serves as cleaning rags for The Machine

An executioner, while waiting for you
Pauses to admire his latest tattoo



1 cf. Eamon Duffy

A White Tee Shirt and a Pack of Camels - peom

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A White Tee Shirt and a Pack of Camels

A white tee shirt with a pack of Camels
Tucked up ‘way cool in the left-side sleeve
And new blue jeans, the cuffs exactly right
And in my back pocket a happenin’ Ace comb

For keeping that duck tail so hot for the chicks
To swoon about, so High School Confidential
A cheap tin switchblade hidden carefully away
More Sharks than the Sharks, more Jets than the Jets

Even Kookier than Kookie, oh, my! -
While swaggering home from junior high

We Are All Reptilian - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

We Are All Reptilian

We’re all reptilian; our skins slough free
Each hour, a few epidermal cells cleared
Sliding away so silently that we
Don’t even know that we have disappeared

And then the dermis – it steps bravely up
The hypodermis in its place stands to
All cells and capillaries to duties new
And slowly, slowly, there is a brand new you

But what is truly important every day
Is that we don’t slough our dear friends away

This is the Last Straw! And Some Inspirational Singer-Songwriters... - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

This is the Last Straw –

and Something About Sacred Buckets of Holistic Ice Water

Sexual predators, human smugglers
Starvation in the Sudan, civil war
in Syria, mass executions in China
Journalists murdered almost everywhere
Fashionable infanticide, homelessness
Unemployment, urban terrorism
Mass murder, school shootings, wildfires, racism
An unstable national government
Anti-Semitism, border desperation
Riots, arson, ecclesiastical corruption
Meth, alcoholism, historical cleansing
Skinheads, abuse, Khardassianistas
Volcanos, the death penalty, free verse
Affluenza, Jerry Springer, The View
Herbal tea, antifa, anti-antifa
And the soul-sucking existential despair
Of inspirational singer-songwriters:

Nah, not a bit worried about plastic straws

But I must go now; The Voices are telling me
To pour a bucket of ice water over my head
(As long as it’s not a plastic bucket)

A Straw Man Accessorized with Exclamation Marks from the Eighth Grade - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Straw Man Accessorized with Exclamation Marks from the Eighth Grade

 (Rainbow Brite™ © Glitter Optional)

I heard it, dude; it’s part of the nexus!
A floating island as big as Texas!
All made of straws, there in the Pacific!
It’s on the ‘Net, dude, it’s there, specific!

It’s a Russian plot, sponsored by Putin!
It’s on the ‘Net, dude, sure as shootin’!
Them plastic straws will soon bring down the grid!
They kill the whales; they even got a squid!

The science is settled; let’s make some laws:
The source of all evil is them plastic straws!!!!!!!

It's Not a Bad Cell, But it is a Cell - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

It’s Not a Bad Cell, But it is a Cell

         If…
          Some Crown of sorrows sit
          Upon a little world for a little hour –
          Who shall remember it? Who shall care for it?

-C. S. Lewis, “In Prison,” Spirits in Bondage

It’s not a bad cell, but it is a cell
Requiring you not to be who you are
Quietly within your designated space
And keeping your insolence to yourself

A grated hatch of disapproval drops
And leaves you to the berth penanced to you
A hard and narrow bunk of pain and guilt
Against a wall that now must be your world

And in that world do thoughtful battle against
Shrill voices telling you how wrong you are

On the Resignation of the Executive Director of a Certain Veterans' Service Organization - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

On the Resignation of the Executive Director

of a Certain Veterans’ Service Organization

Our leaders’ reputations decay in the corners
Of their star-spangled offices, curling up
Like fallen leaves wind-blown against a fence
Then writhing in the rubbish-fires of history

Their bubble reputations in their own mouths 1
Ephemeral as the grey and ashy smoke
Adrift among the vaporous lies that once
Scented the sewage of their resumes’

Our leaders call us comrades, shipmates, brothers -
From their forward positions on the 501C

1 Shakespeare, “The Ages of Man”

Saint Gregory of Nyssa Orders a Cup of Coffee in Constantinople - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Saint Gregory of Nyssa Orders a Cup of Coffee

The whole city is full of it – in the squares,
The coffee shops, the ‘blogs, the op-ed pieces
The emails, the news sites, the grocery stores
They are all busy arguing -

If you ask someone to give you change
He says the President is the Begotten One
If you inquire about the price of a croissant
You are told by way of reply that he is not

That the Supreme Court is greater, and that
The President is inferior; if you ask
“Is my cup of Blue Mountain ready?”
The barista answers that Congress is nothing

In the squares, the coffee shops, the ‘blogs,
The op-ed pieces – the whole city is full of it





Saint Gregory’s amused (one hopes) observation on the fondness of the population of Constantinople for arguing theology is well known, and is available at:

http://readthefathers.org/2012/08/19/patristic-theology-is-for-everyone/

The Dangers of Smoking after Heaving the Dead into a Helicopter - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Dangers of Smoking

from an idea by Sheila Sharpe

In the foul heat and damp and rot and stench
After dusting off 1 the bodies of dead pals
The living and the dead, the living dead
Old Boats 2 lit off a cigarette and growled

“They say this stuff’ll kill ya.”


1 Dustoff – noun. Dust off – verb with an adverb. A dustoff is a medical evacuation via helicopter, as in “Doc, your dustoff will be here in three.” To dust off a patient, then, is to transport a patient, not to tidy him. I have recently read detailed arguments about the terms dustoff, dust off, and medevac, but no one quibbled about such minutiae along the Cambodian border.

2 Boats – a boatswain’s mate, the brains and muscle of the Navy. Boatswain’s mates do it all and are seldom acknowledged in history or art, not even in the recent film about Dunkirk. A boatswain’s mate is usually addressed as Boats, and always with deference, even by the C.O.

M. Poncy Hector-Tworbst, B.A., M.Ed., Ph.D. Candidate, Speaks - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

On the Packing of Intersectionality: A Cross-Cultural Study

By M. Poncy Hector-Tworbst, B.A., M.Ed., Ph.D. Candidate

Unpack that intersectionality
And privilege transphile autonomy
Unite the paradigm’s hegemony
In the diaspora of agency

Cross-gender all peripherality
In post-colonial diversity
Dialogue augmented reality
And deconstruct avatar identity

All for the cause of authenticity
(But mostly I’m all about me, me, me)

A Summer Afternoon at 209 East Huisache Avenue - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Summer Afternoon at 209 East Huisache Avenue

Kingsville, Texas, 1955

A loaf of bread from the Piggly Wiggly
A quart of milk because MawMaw forgot
A Coke and a Mickey Mouse funnybook
A water pistol and Eskimo Pies

A pack of PawPaw’s brand of cigarettes
So he can watch his Yankees this afternoon
On the Sylvania with the rabbit ears
In gloriously static-y black-and-white

Plays called by Dizzy Dean and PeeWee Reese
In our childhood world, forever at peace

Two Middle-Aged Youth Ministers in a Convertible - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Two Middle-Aged Youth Ministers in a Convertible

Two middle-aged youth ministers (perhaps)
In a convertible babble away
A dialogue but poorly understood
By a seeker wanting a burger and fries
                                                and truth

Their message seems to be that a pilgrim
In search of meaning might find happiness
                                                and lunch
At a famed neon-y fast-foodery
And so I gird up my billfold and I go

I push the red votive button and wait
And wait
                And wait
                                And wait
                                                And wait
                                                                And wait

And in the end go empty away

Syllabus for a Summer Day - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Syllabus for a Summer Day

Awaken with the sun, and while thin mist
Slinks eerily across the fields, step out -
Labor across the dewy grass, near ripe
For the second cutting of summer hay

The lesson for today is clearing brush
Along the fence lines of both fields and life
The attendance check is for needed tools:
Old gloves, old boots, old saw, and fresh new verse

Awaken with the sun, honor the day
With work and play to earn a grade of A

Alternative Syllabus for a Summer Day

Ignore the stupid sun; go back to sleep
Reject the chatter of the alarming beep
And waken at a reasonable Christian hour –
Oh, ten will do; earlier is so sour!

Then bathrobe-shuffle to the coffee pot
See what is on the news, or maybe not
And scratch and yawn and look around to see
That nothing has changed since last night at three

Ignore all work; just stick it on the shelf
And for my grade, I’ll happily take an F!

Provide Yourself with Words - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Provide Yourself with Words

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

If You Don't Have a Guitar, Are You Permitted to Pose for Publicity Photos on a Railway Line? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

An Existential Issue for Many Writers: If You Don’t Have a Guitar,

Are You Permitted to Pose for Publicity Photos on a Railway Line?

His battered old laptop slung across his back
That famous laptop with the sticker that reads
In font Albertus “This Machine Kills Haters”
He poses rustically on a railway line

His happenin’ hipster hat pulled ‘way down low
Over the deep-souled Eyes That Have Seen It All
While his slender, artistic fingers seem
To flutter in search of existential truth

(Or maybe two forms of identification)

While off camera a cop writes him a ticket
For trespassing on railway property

Of That Ilk (or, perhaps, Ilk Hunting) - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Of That Ilk

For three Voices

First Voice:

What is an ilk?

Second Voice:

Well, they got ‘em up in Montana, you know,
And Canada, and them countries like that
And they got horns and stuff; you can hunt ‘em
They make good eatin’, or that’s what they say

Third Voice:

Naw, man, ilks is what attaches to boats
That’s why you got to scrape the hulls each year
They’re kinda like sea urchins or barnacles
They make good eatin’, or that’s what they say

First Voice:

I read about ilks in the op-eds each day -
They make good eatin’, or that’s what they say

Robin Hood's Favorite Saint - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Farmer to Saint Swithin

O good Saint Swithin, please, to you we pray,
On this your high-summer rain-making day –
Of your blest kindness send us sweet, soft showers,
The kind that gently fall for hours and hours,

To heal the sunburnt land of thirst and drought
And nourish the corn that sees the winter out;
And if you grant the boon we humbly ask
We’ll work the harder on each rural task:

We’ll ditch and fence and plough, and milk the cow,
Share with the widder-folk, and feed the sow,
Count out some plantful seeds for poor folks’ needs,
And daily tell God’s Mysteries on our beads.


(The 15th of August is Saint Swithin's Day.)