For the Sonic Waitress Who Wish Me a Blessed Day and Stole My Change - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

For the Sonic Waitress Who Wished Me a Blessed Day

and Stole My Change

I was just passing through
You didn’t know me; I didn’t know you
But I should have known you’d steal from me
When you told me to Have a Blessed Day

You never came back with the change
And that is sad. We have come to accept the lies
Of praychurs, presidents, and prime ministers
But one expects better of Sonic waitresses

And you told me to have a blessed day

So you’re 40 cents to the bad, that’s true
But I’ve got the dollar I was going to tip you

And, hey, y’all have a blessed day, y’hear?

"I Know Where the Door Is, You Little Police Academy Dropout!" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Secretary-Receptionist Faces the Future -

“I Know Where the Door Is, You Little Police Academy Dropout!”

The name on the building changed again today
I must apply for my own job, they say
A smarmer wants more work for much less pay
It’s time to reconstruct my resume’

I once was great with videotape and film
And could type fifty-five words a minute
On an IBM Selectric; my skills are dim
The boy-boss taps on a plastic box - what’s in it?

For forty years I ruled the company’s ground floor -
Security, with a sneer, shows me the door

Whisper Your Area 51 - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Whisper Your Area 51

“Russian Aircraft Flies Over Area 51…”

-U.K. Daily Mail, 31 March 2019

Each of us is an Area 51
In hiding from a psychic bombing run
Behind the barbed-wire fences of our senses
Beneath the radar of our consequences

Our secrets are so secret that even we
Don’t know what they might be, could be, will be
Because the slide-rule calculating hearts
Can only slip between odd-numbered parts

Each of us is an Area 51
Playing hide-and-go-seek
                                                   but not for fun

A Luddite and His Timex Watch - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Watch Out!

Some millionaire on the a.m. radio was pitying himself the other day: his expensive, high-tech, high-tone Fruit™ watch (or was it a vegetable watch?) wasn’t acting right, wouldn’t hold a charge, and had to be re-programmed every day until tech support (or Tech Support) worked their magic on it.

Mr. Millionaire, meet the $10 Timex. Oops - it’s up to $24 now. My Timex, which “takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” as John Cameron Swayze used to say, cost only $10 at Giganto-Mart, but that was years ago.

A Timex needs no programming; all you do is re-set it twice a year for the semi-annual fall-fully-forward-spring-latch-back-attack thing.

The basic Timex watch is soooooooooooooo uncool. A Timex will not impress your date. A Timex will not impress your beagle. A Timex is redolent of the pool room, not the board room. A discriminating mugger will sneer at a Timex with the same contempt he once demonstrated for the Ford Fiesta. A Timex does not speak of elegance, guess your height and weight, tell you the future, measure the deterioration of your liver, or calculate the decay of the planet’s orbit around the sun. All a Timex does is show you the time with two little pointers, also known as hands, although they aren’t really hands. We just call them hands, you see.

Clever people, those Chinese, to have invented such a cheap and reliable way of telling time. Not that time will listen to what you tell it.

A Timex comes in a variety of colors and straps, and some variations are named Expedition™ and Iron Man™ and such, plain little ol’ watches that have watched too many Rambo movies and have costumed themselves in dime-store camouflage and outfitted themselves with itty-bitty Russian Kalashnikovs.

When the battery in a Timex wears out, you can usually replace it yourself. Just unscrew the back, drop the battery, note the number, and go to the drug store for a replacement. This is needful only every two or three years, sometimes longer.

A watch should not need programming. Nor should a radio or a teevee set or a telephone, but the STEMinstas will not have it that when you buy something it should simply work. Oh, no; now you must read books and access sites and give strangers your credit card numbers and a snapshot of your passport in order to validate and start up a gadget for which you have already paid.

I suppose next we’ll have to program our pocket knives and fountain pens. A carpenter roofing in the hot sun might have to knock off work for an hour to access a spiderwebsite and purchase a yearly update for his hammer. Screwdrivers might need occasional re-programming. And don’t get me started on the complications of electronic 2 x 4s.

Young people might find adapting to a wristwatch of any kind a challenge. Instead of automatically reaching into a pocket or purse for the MePhone to check the time they would have to learn how to swing an arm out and up to read the little dial. And, yes, they’d have to figure out what “hands” are and how to work out the time from the hands’ positions.

But then, wearing a watch at all, even a Timex, might enhance a young man or woman’s coolness factor: “Hey, Heather-Misty-Dakota-Shane, what’s that neat-looking thing on your wrist? I’ve got to get me one!”

Well, as they say in that old movie in which James Arness plays a giant, carnivorous carrot, “Watch the skies!”

-30-

William Shakespeare Murdered Edward deVere in the Library with the Pipe Wrench - hardly a poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

William Shakespeare Murdered Edward deVere in

the Library with the Pipe Wrench

Of course one asks what was the library doing
With a pipe wrench.

-The End-

I Lit a Candle for You at Mass, Only I Didn't - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

I Lit a Candle for You - Only I Didn’t



Before the Mass I went to light for you
A Penny Candle (it’s a Looney now)
And with it send a prayer up through the air
Throughout the liturgy, into the night

But, oh, how sad that it could not be so
For all the little paper matches were damp
And all I have to offer you today
Are heaps of cardboard strips in a little tray

But even so: within my heart, you know
There is for you forever a votive glow


(Looney - a Canadian dollar, but of course one needn’t put in a coin at all)

About Those University Admission Bribes... - rhyming doggerel

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Temporary, Part-Time, Adjunct Faculty Instructor of No Significance Whatsoever at a Little Cinder-Block Community College Unknown to Anyone Beyond the Interstate Bypass Asks the Most Important Question About Admissions Bribery

Oh, please forgive this seeming diatribe
But I am one of the scrivening tribe
A poor Chaucerian scholar, a scribe

Who asks

Why doesn’t anyone offer me a bribe?

Does This Lumberjack Shirt Make My Pajama Bottom Look Big? - rhyming doggerel

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Does This Lumberjack Shirt Make My Pajama Bottom Look Big?

“Men Ditch Suits, and Retailers Struggle to Adapt”

-Wall Street Journal, 25 March 2019

We all must be good comrades now
We all must wear good comradewear
As if we worked with wrench and plough
Instead of cruising an office chair

We all must be good comrades, da!
And from one’s well-lit office space
Sneer at “the suits” - so long, Grandpa!
And so decolonise this place

We all must be good comrades now -
But have you ever milked a cow?

0400 at Denny's Along the Interstate - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

0400 at Denny’s Along the Interstate

A line cook at Denny’s (must have own pans)
Is an artist, accomplished in assemblage
Compositions of eggs (rather like Cezanne’s)
Toast, bacon, waffles for his decoupage

His gesso is the window layered in steam
Built of reflections and condensation
Hinting at the flowing Interstate stream
Beyond the No Smoking pumping station

The line cook has indeed his pans and plans -
Art, as the muse of cookery commands

Morning Courage - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Morning Courage

Some have said that the bravest thing we do
Is to get up each morning and face the dawn
It may be so. The light is grey and cold
There seem to be no reasons to go on

And yet - the morning sun begins to kiss
The sensitive, delicate springtime leaves
Turning their own hopes to the morning sun
Stretching their chloroplasts awake to life

So even as sunlight embraces the tree
So maybe there will be kisses - we’ll see!

A Hasty Partisan Response to the Mueller Report - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Hasty Partisan Response to the Mueller Report

“And art made tongue-tied by authority”

-Sonnet 66, often quoted by Pasternak

The Russian reports on my desk include:

Selected Poems, Yevtushenko
The Possessed, Dostoyevsky
The Zhivago Affair, Finn and Couvee
The Complete Poems of Anna Ahkmatova
August 1914, Solzhenitsyn


And some of them unread, some of them read
And better read than red, so someone said
Some of them shelved (We and The House of the Dead)
But now I’m going to work the flower bed

And what century is it outside? 1


1 Pasternak

A Sidewalk Artist Who Knows Who You Were - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Sidewalk Artist Who Knows Who You Were

“He is a dreamer; let us leave him – pass.” Julius Caesar I.ii.24

Strident philosophers at Hyde Park Corner
Poor buskers at Queen Victoria’s feet
Chalk artists remaking the pavement as Rome
A Seventh Sister with her folk guitar

These are not dreamers passive in their beds
Or supplicants awaiting permission:
They are the worker bees; they know of pain
And sweat, and sunstroke in the fields - and truth

When a sidewalk artist notes that the Ides
Have come, Caesar indeed should turn to hear

A Moment of Byronic Arrogance - rhyming triplet

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Moment of Byronic Arrogance

Whether I am on the right side of history
Is a fantasy and an irrelevancy -
History had better be on the right side of me

Across the Cemetery Fence - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Across the Cemetery Fence

Hart-Bevil Cemetery, Tyler County, Texas

From service as Companions of the Conqueror
To the democracy of death and dust


This was family land in the long ago
Now alienated from the living
Accessible through permissions and locks
But we and the ghosts are okay with that

They say that only four of them were hanged
The dealer in false deeds died of old age
Some possibly were saints; hard to believe
For after all, we are de Beauville’s kin

From Normandy, and then green Chesterton
And then dispersed to the colonies
At the convenience of His Majesty
De Beauvilles and Bevilles and then Bevils

And some are buried on this lonely knoll
Dim mossy bones and stones among the pines
Across the fence a little heap of glass
Broken flower vases from the dime store


Now the democracy of dust and death
But once
                     Companions of the Conqueror

The Select Committee for Something or Other Meets in Market Basket #3 - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Select Committee for Something or Other

Meets in Market Basket #3

We have no fine old paneling of oak
No ancient silver on a sideboard new
When Charles the First still wore his handsome head
We have no Latin, we may not smoke, but still -

Between the cinder blocks and coffee urn
Dining upon the finest plastic foam
We laugh at yarns that Saint Augustine thought
Well out of date when Africa lost Rome

We have no fine old paneling of oak
But every day we share a fine old joke

A Young Wasp in Spring - Appropriate Respect for Life Forms - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Young Wasp in Spring

The spring morning was chill when from its nest
A young wasp fell, helpless and young
Upon the ground, needing the warmth of the sun
To spread its tiny dragon’s wings into new life

A creature of God, needing only an hour
To gain its strength, and so to live the life
Destined for it, its appointed mission
In the unknowable Plan of Creation

It seemed to beg for mercy with each desperate breath
And so with great care I crushed it to death

Saint Joseph's Day - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Saint Joseph the Just

Saint Joseph in a dreary winter night
Took to himself a newborn not his own,
Who yet is always his, the Child of Light
Whose crib Saint Joseph knew to be a throne

Saint Joseph shows men truth: each child is ours,
Adopted by each good man upon birth;
True fatherhood ordained in starlit hours
And ratified in Heaven and on earth.

Saint Joseph is the man who looked into
The eyes of Mary in her happy youth;
This strong man looked into her eyes and knew
She bore within her all eternal Truth.

Our witness is Saint Joseph, ever just:
God calls each man to take each child in trust.

Mission Beach and a Blue Bikini - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Mission Beach and a Blue Bikini

Your grandmother and I are the only ones
Who listen still to Rod McKuen, and dream
Of Mission Beach ‘way back in ‘68
Or maybe not so far back after all

The sands still sing of sea and salt and seals
There are no watchful clocks to time our hopes
No calendars to tell us we are old
As we slow dance to a tiny transistor

But not with each other, not any more
For I had my orders, and she had hers

The Porch Light Flickers in Parental Disapproval - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Porch Light Flickers in Parental Disapproval

Sweet music on the Mustang’s radio
We’re sitting in her parents’ driveway

And sort of talking about the movie
And sort of talking about poetry and life

Frost is settling on the hood of the car
But all is warm in our bubble of love

Until

Our kiss is interrupted by the flickering
Of the parental, watchful front porch light

We sigh. We kiss. The censorial eye -
It orders me away - “That’s all! Bye-bye!”

(Oh, flick that porch light anyway!)

A Contemporary Vocabulary fro Writers and Artists - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Contemporary Vocabulary for Writers and Artists

As culled from an art magazine, 13 March 2019

 

Socialist Realism - The official doctrine in Soviet art and literature after 1932 that evolved from the traditional commitment to social and civic concerns into an all-pervasive general ideological mandate.

 

-Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 20th Century Russian Poetry

collective exhibition space vibe community
interactive narrative brown neighborhood
defined commodified Indigenous
identity tone-deaf decolonial
narratives populist intertwined
exhibition curatorial vision
culture local artists arts district small galleries
DIY spaces speaking out against
gentrification displacing shelter
studio space elsewhere late stage capitalism
collective mantra underdog art savior
corporate entity partnering insensitive
ignorant collective brown people art
contemporary work that may not fit
into establishment art galleries
media advisory venture collaborate
creative community authentic
local statement of expression excitement
creative energy arts district project
many levels collaborate local
creative important creative
community what that collaboration
looks like ongoing local artists going
to be engaged in planning commissioned
project community buy-in consulted
members of the creative community
Indigenous artists curators museum
directors professors burgeoning landscape
cultural framework critique talk individuals
entities inclusivity open
dialogue opportunities project
conversations collaboration discuss
your projects share our work with you
common ground work together healthy sustainable
accountable decolonization