A Sexy Young Philosopher Lapses into Existential Despair - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Young Philosopher Lapses Into Existential Despair

Once upon a time -

A young philosopher sat among men
In the shaded olive groves of Athens
Incense to the Muses, wisdom to all
His ideas soared like Athena’s owls

One day a wise ómorfo korítsi
Delighted him with her strong arguments
Delighted him with her dark Hellenic eyes
Delighted him with a dinner invitation

And as they reclined in symposium met
With verse and wine and wisdom in delight
He excused himself to the toualéta
Where on its walls he read in Attic verse:

If you sprinkle
When you tinkle
Be a sweetie
Lift the seatie

After that his fellow philosophers
Saw him gently into a nursing home

"I Went, And I Am Still Going" - a poem on the occasion of my retirement

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“I Went, And I Am Still Going.”

This is a re-post of "All Change at Zima Junction." This morning I turned in my keys after some forty years of herding cattle (metaphorically), some seventeen of them with this institution. I am unemployed for the first time since I was five or so and was set to toddling out to the chicken yard every evening to gather the eggs in an old Easter basket. My mother said that the rooster often chased me and made me cry, but I don’t remember that.

And now - what adventure does Aslan have next for me?

The first book I bought upon returning home from Viet-Nam was the Penguin Modern European Poets paperback edition of Yevtushenko: Selected Poems. That 75-cent paperback from an airport bookstall in San Francisco is beside me on the desk as I write.

All Change at Zima Junction

For Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1932-2017

Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
Changes lives; nineteen becomes twenty-one
With hardly a pause for twenty and then
Everyone asks you questions you can’t answer

And then they say you’ve changed, and ignore you
The small-town brief-case politician still
Enthroned as if he were a committee -
He asks you what you are doing back here

And then you go away, on a different train:
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction

“I went, and I am still going.”1

1 Yevtushenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962

Rain Makes Even Concrete Beautiful - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Rain Makes Even Concrete Beautiful

The rain makes even concrete beautiful:
A drop, then two, and then a singing shower
Baptizing the pavement with little pools
That catch the lights and bounce them all about:

Street lights all golden, rippling up and down
And automobile lights slipping across
The other lights, interrupted by feet
Splashing and slipping all the wet way home

And you, dancing about in the puddles -
The rain makes even love more beautiful


(A brief look through the InterGossip does not show that “Rain Makes Even Concrete Beautiful” has been used as the title for a song or poem or other “spot of art” (as Bertie Wooster would say). If it has, please advise me so I can change it.)

And You Paid a Company in New Jersey for This - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

And You Paid a Company in New Jersey for This

Last week a 5th-grade child in Lumberton, Texas suffering through the STAAR test (which is the successor to the TABS, and then the TEAMS, and then the TAAS, and then the TAKS, all to the greater glory of the Texas Education Agency) found an illustration which contained a bad word.

You and I would agree that it is a bad word, though the purveyors of what now passes for popular entertainment are pleased to promote it to all, and it is flung around like poo by men and women of all ages in social situations. Hearing a bespectacled, demure-looking granny snorting the f-bomb in a coffee shop while surrounded by children does not speak well for contemporary mutual respect.

The Texas Education Agency, which is what bossy old Miz Grundy became when she went off to college and put on even more airs, cycles through a lot of taxpayer dollars to take care of themselves, bother other people, and inflict cycles of alphabet-soup exams on children.

The TEA is fond of bullying districts, and as an acquaintance more familiar with their ‘tude than I says, the TEA should now taste their own cod liver oil and be required to submit to the local school districts a three-part corrective action plan and regular status reports, and if they fail in remediating the matter of naughty words on their made-in-New Jersey tests to understand that their elected board (yes, you elected them) is subject to being replaced by an appointed board and a state monitor.

According to The Texas Tribune (https://salaries.texastribune.org/state-comptroller-payroll/departments/texas-education-agency/positions/commissioner-texas-education/), Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath receives $220,375 annually for his service to the children of Texas, so, yes, for that kind of cabbage he should being watching his own office and its doings.

The various exit-level exams used in this state are sold to Texas by Pearson Publishing, a British company headquartered in London and with marketing tentacles all over the world, and by Educational Testing Service in New Jersey, which is far more foreign than Britain.

A salient question is why Texas families are taxed by the Texas state government to pay out-of-state and out-of-country companies to generate tests for Texas children in Texas schools.

Are there no universities, schools of education, and publishers in Texas who can build exams (with or without awkward pictures) and publish textbooks for Texas children, or are we to be forever a cultural colony somewhere beyond Carlo Levi’s Eboli?

-30-

I Visited a High School ("Hisssssssss...!") - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

I Visited a High School

I visited a high school the other day
Walking past the police car at the door
Into a vestibule cold-camera-watched
Presenting identification at a window

Efficiently buzzed through into a hall
Which stank of aggressive disinfectant
Among the shoalings a poor unhappy girl
Angrily picked her nose and glared at me

And hissed behind my back as I went my way
(It’s all the fault of the teachers, they say)




(If you want to be alone for a while, go vote in your local school board elections. Everyone else is too busy complaining.)

The Sorrows of Younger Werther, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. Candidate - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Sorrows of Younger Werther, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. Candidate

A grown man in knee-pants and a cartoon tee
Flip-flopping along in his shower shoes
His hands up in surrender as he runs
A MePhone in his left, water bottle in his right

Nasaling “OmyGod! OmyGod! OmyGod!”
It’s his all-purpose whining upspeak chant
Wailed out for any grade less than an A
Or for a kitty-cute MeTube video

And now for a campus shooting: “Why me!?”
I just didn’t think it would happen here!”


(cf. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther)

That Tricky Trompe L'oeil - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

That Tricky Trompe L’oeil

Wait! I thought I saw
A trompe l’oeil trompe-ing along -
I could have been wrong

A Worker's Response to Carol Vanderveer Hamilton's "May Day" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Worker’s Response to Carol Vanderveer Hamilton’s “May Day”

As one of the blue-jacketed workers
As a defiant student
As a child of poverty
Who never had a bicycle to ride to the Sorbonne

I repudiate your vivid red flags
And your graduate-school keyboard revolution
And your catalogue of cliches’ and cant
And your crawling housefly symbolism

As one of the blue-jacketet workers
As a defiant student
After an all-night shift in the plastics factory
I like my cuppa Earl Grey tea in my bleeding hands

Someday I’ll have a bourgeois balcony
And from it look down on your stereotypes

Streaming Forbidden Love - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Streaming Forbidden Love

So many movies on the streaming service
Advert themselves as about forbidden love
Until one wonders if there is any love
Which is not forbidden
                                           your credit card welcome

An Extraordinary Ordinary Life - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

An Extraordinary Ordinary Life

For Mrs. Tinney Davidson, The Waving Grandma

Comox, British Columbia

She lived in an ordinary house in an ordinary street
And every day she waved to children passing by
And every day the waved-at children waved back
Because a wave is a good beginning to the day

In the morning she waved the children along to school
And in the evening waved them back again home
And every day the waved-at children waved back
Just like the waves that hug a beach, with love

And then one day she went away, and waved -
And the waved-at children will wave back forever

Extraordinary!

(cf. Here and Now, CBC St. John’s, 26 April 2019)

Manic Pixie Dream Girl at a Funeral - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Manic Pixie Dream Girl at a Funeral

The manic pixie dream girl of my youth
Curving and tight, scampering along the beach
Her wild black hair flying about as she danced
Teasing all the boys with her sunlit joys

I read to her Rod McKuen by candlelight
While Joni Mitchell on the turntable mused
We played and smoked, and drank good screwcap wine
And played some more, and then she went away

And now - an old lady in a funeral home pew
And I’m not so sure of myself anymore


(“Manic pixie dream girl” is a neologism attributed to film critic Nathan Rubin)

Pascha at St. Michael's Orthodox Church - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Pascha at St. Michael’s Orthodox Church

Happy Easter / Pascha to a Russian Orthodox Friend

What sort of man sits in the silent dark
And waits for a small candle to be lit
When he could reach over and flip a switch
For the miracle of electricity

Bravely to course through the building’s wired veins
The march of progress with a touch controlled
By the hand of humanity triumphant
Over Byzantine superstition. Tell us:

What hopeful sort of man waits for the dawn,
For Light to appear from a cold, sealed tomb?

A Clerisy of One - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Clerisy of One

I am a clerisy of one
I argue with myself a lot
And as I speak I know I’ve won
I’m all about me, and you are not

For President of the United States - Me - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

For President of the United States - Me

For fear of being the only American not to run for office this election cycle, I now announce that I want to serve me I mean…You The People…of this great land as your next president.

I also want the fleet of presidential jets, the garage of great big SUVs, the household staff, an armored train with great big nuclear cannons that go “BOOM!”, a bunch of helicopters, and a gold-plated toilet that lights up and plays “Hail to the Chief” when flushed, just like the Constitution says.

I solemnly swear that if you elect me as your next president I will let you little people look at all the jet airplanes, SUVs, the armored train, and the helicopters you pay for.

The Gold-Plated Toilet of The People is off-limits, though.

As your president I’m not going to ride Amtrak, carry my own suitcase, or eat in a roadside diner. I want all the goodies. I want my presidency to be a reflection of my America. And you can look at your reflection in a mirror.

As your president I will see to it that my family and my friends fly on presidential airplanes to London, Paris, Rome, Saint Petersburg, Saint Moritz, and Tokyo on shopping trips and vacations so that you can be inspired by how your tax dollars are making my buddies happy. Just like some of the previous presidents.

As your president I will bill the Secret Service for protecting me at the best rate quoted by the Deutsche Bank. After all, if those guys are going to hang around on my lawn in all sorts of weather protecting me and my family, they should pay me rent, okay? Just like the previous president.

As your president I will hang around with and pay off only those dictators with a good fashion sense. When Kim Jong Ill ditches the mousey-dung play-school outfit and learns to wear a coat and tie like a grownup, then we can talk. And no Justin Trudeau socksies, either.

As your president I will tell you what’s in Area 51. And Area 50. It stands to reason that if there is an Area 51 then there must be an Area 50. It’s so secret that you haven’t even heard of it. That’s what The Voices tell me.

As your president I will develop a national health and exercise program whose core strategy is having everyone run laps around former Governor Christie of New Jersey.

As your president I will build a big, beautiful, yuuuuge wall built around the Internal Revenue Service.

As your president I will sign an executive order banning the death penalty except for telemarketers - for them death by throwing them into a pit of ravenous dachshunds will be mandatory.

As your president I will ask Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson to form a select committee for writing lyrics for “Hail to the Chief, and I am the Chief.”

And remember, my fellow Americans, a vote for me is a vote for, well, me.

Thank you, thank you. And don’t forget to send the Benjamins.

-30-

An Execution - Maybe the Prisoner was Already Dead - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Maybe the Prisoner was Already Dead

“...he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.”

-George Orwell, “A Hanging”

Evening. Maybe he was already dead
Dead long before the State boys strapped him down
And a functionary started an I.V. drip
Left arm? Or right? In a cinder-block room

Fluorescent lights

With windowed faces posted on both sides
Testaments to the protocols of death
The liturgy of falling away because
He and the lads murdered a helpless man

Fluorescent lights

He breathed. And then he didn’t. His bowels let go
And did they put a Band-Aid on the wound?

Fluorescent lights

But now

Let’s go outside and feel the wind

                                                            We live

Choking on Aspirational Hyphens - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Choking on Aspirational Hyphens

Our straw boss, now, she hyphenates her name
And there is something frightening about
Those faux dashes fastened between the nouns
Her proper nouns, as if they might slip loose

And fall onto the pages of Debrett’s
As isolated bits of DNA
Dropping their aitches and their gees, oh, please!
So tack that Burberry hyphen back again

Let no proletarian taint be seen -
Made in China becomes Fabrique en Chine

"We Will Rebuild Notre Dame Even More Beautifully" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“We Will Rebuild Notre Dame Even More Beautifully”

-President Macron

Your privacy is guaranteed
There’s nothing to see here, nothing
He died while trying to escape
Now, then, this might sting a little

Winning the hearts and minds of the people
A light at the end of the tunnel
Lose weight without diet or exercise
We never sell your information

Uploaded unintentionally
Oh, sure, I’ll pay you back next week

Neo-Platonic Darwinian Bird-Ness - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Neo-Platonic Darwinian Bird-Ness

The birds might say, “Oh, look at the pretty humans!
They have waited all winter for us to return!”
And so we have, like seasonal hoteliers
Inviting our guests back for their holiday

The seed-buffets on little metal trays
And little plastic houses in the trees
Bespeak our thoughtful hospitality
For little friends who live upon their wings

Now summering in nest and eave and steeple
The birds must laugh, “Oh look at the people!”

Ubi Petrus - poem (a repost for Easter Sunday)

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Ubi Petrus

For Inky and Jason

“Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia”

- St. Ambrose of Milan

Where Peter was, there also was the Tomb --
Blood-sodden dreams cold-rotting in old sin,
The Chalice left unwashed, the Upper Room
A three-days’ grave for hope-forsaken men.

Where Peter is, there also should we be,
Poor pilgrims, his, a-kneel before the Throne
Of Eosian Christendom, and none but he
Is called to lead the Church to eternal Dawn.

Where Peter then will be, there is the Faith,
Transubstantiation, whipped blood, ripped flesh
A solid reality, not a wraith
Of shop-soiled heresies labeled as fresh.

Where Peter is, O Lord, there let us pray,
Poor battered wanderers along Your way.

No One Has Messed Up Good Friday Yet - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

No One Has Messed Up Good Friday Yet

All Souls’ and All Saints’ were made to disappear
Easter is bad enough with rabbit eggs
And Christmas was appropriated by The People
As a tribute to (belch) Glorious Excess

But no one has taken Good Friday away
With gifts and treats and two-for-one specials
Down at Chez Bubba’s Discount Liquor and Smokes,
And Colonial Auto Parts stays open - why not?

But while the world spins along on its way
A few eccentrics remember Him this day



I'm late with this.  I hope the Holy Saturday Hamster (who leaves omelettes for good little girls and boys) isn't miffed about it.