Dear (famous poetry magazine) - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Dear (famous poetry magazine)

Dear (famous poetry magazine):

                                                    There is little interest
In reading about anyone’s scrotum
His pancreas, maybe, or his elbow
Hands are nice, especially fingertips

Some of my best friends are men, I’ll admit
I’ll even sit at the table with them
They cook, they clean, they sing their little songs
Just as long as they know their place, okay?

As for scrota, I know they have their rights
But don’t get me started on the phagocytes








To Miz Grundy, Ideologues, Censors, and the Perpetually Outraged:

There is only frivolity here. I repudiate ideology, identity politics, and the misuse of art as propaganda. I would enjoy hearing about your loves, your visions of beauty, you first car, and your dog, but if you're packing outrage please leave it with the deputy at the edge of town (cf. Rio Bravo).

Cordially,

The Town Ne'er-Do-Well, His Mark: X

Two Hearts That Beat as Three - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Two Hearts That Beat as Three

Is she looking at another? Is she?
Maybe while dancing, or over a drink
Or over the news at the coffee shop
Or when she thinks I’m looking away

Is she looking at another? Is she?
I mean, it’s all right; people look at people
It’s only normal. It doesn’t mean anything
But are they looking at each other?

Is she looking at another? Is she?
Is she looking at another?
                                                 Am I?

The Execution of Pugachev - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

The Execution of Pugachev

The Little Father of his people hanged them
Along the banks of the Volga he hanged them
He told them he was the Czar, and hanged them
He told them they were free, and hanged them

Catherine saved her people, and she hanged them
Along the banks of the Volga she hanged them
She was their true Empress, and she hanged them
But Pugachev she beheaded and burned

The land was desolation, smoke, and ash
And the survivors were yoked to the plough

As Good Ol' Charlie Brown Did Not Say... - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

As Good Ol’ Charlie Brown Did Not Say…

There is no grief so painful
No enormity so offensive
No indignity so humiliating
No injustice so neglected
No frontier so walled
No crime so repulsive
No disaster so unresolved
No woman so wounded
No child so hungry
No man so lonely

That someone won’t type a

                                                                 #

In indignation

And then go for coffee

Concluding that he has done all he should

The Iowa Caucus: "I'm Sorry Dave; I'm Afraid I Can't Do That" - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Iowa Caucus:

“I’m Sorry, Dave; I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That”

From the Iowa Caucus we finally learn the nature of the H.A.L. in 2001: A Space Odyssey – it’s any computer used to record and tabulate our votes. It’s big, it’s expensive, it doesn’t do what it’s programmed to do, and it might kill democracy.

“I am completely operational, and all my circuits are functioning perfectly.”

The Iowa Caucus is a curious method for sorting out party candidates to run in general elections: it seems to consist of people moving around and then being counted. Odd, but it worked. Past tense. Some clever lads and their cliched electronic start-up – Shadow, Incorporated - developed an app (there’s always an app) to tally the votes electronically and sold this package of magic S.T.E.M. beans to the Iowa Democratic Party.

“I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.”

The Shadow reported no results for hours, and days later no one trusted the incomplete results it finally excreted. According to the rules of the game, the party candidates can go no further if they don’t have the numbers, and the numbers were spinning and tumbling in a void for days.

“…I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.”

The Iowa Democratic Party sprayed the usual fog of cliches, evasions, and excuses: “clarity,” “coding error,” “transparent,” “modernize,” “new app,” “new backup systems,” “abundance of caution,” and blah-blah.

(https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2020/02/04/iowa-democratic-party-delayed-caucus-results-should-soon-published/4659581002/)

“I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do.”

When political parties mess with elections (a fine old Texas tradition; Iowa could learn from us), the challenge used to be corrupting, organizing, and silencing a number of people.

Altering ballots in a back room or making a physical ballot box full of paper ballots disappear (https://texasmonitor.org/missing-ballot-box-may-be-reason-for-vote-discrepancy-in-midland-county-election/) requires skill and good old-fashioned teamwork.

Making electronic ballots disappear, change, and dance on the grave of the Republic requires only one obedient techno-functionary and his laptop.

“This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”

No computerized voting, please. Let’s stay with paper ballots, each of which is counted by several tabulators and observers. If political parties, any of them, are going to steal our votes, let’s make them work for it.

-30-

Rome in the Back Yard - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Rome in the Back Yard

Upon reading Cecil Day-Lewis’

“A Letter from Rome”

Well, okay, it’s not really Rome back here
It’s Texas, right? But still, some Senator
Of his people spoke in a language lost
Of duty and work and foreign relations

Treaties with the nations across the creek
Military service and sacred rites
Hunting and work, care for the holy fire
And kindnesses to the aged and weak

Here, where the liveoak shadows everything
Yes, here, right here, before we Others came

Saturday with Hegel - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Saturday with Hegel

I. Morning Thesis - Down at the Old-Man Café

Lock and load lock her up love that Trump
Another coffee hey check out her *ss
They just need th’ Bible and whup them kids
Th’ Superbowl coon hunt d*mned snowflake libs

II. Afternoon Antithesis - Deep in the Literary Magazines

Iconic icon self-empowerment
Patriarchal oppressivist must-read
Post-neo-trans-colonialist quagmire
Of gender-fluid green technocracy

III. Evening…Synthesis?

There is no synthesis to be found here
To Phhhht! with them; let’s have another beer

Gift Shop Idols - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Gift Shop Idols

                    How sharply our children will be ashamed…
                    Remembering how in so strange a time
                    Common integrity could look like courage

-Yevtushenko, “Talk”

They were neither ancient nor beautiful
Someone procured them and said that they were so
Those gift shop idols before which poor weaklings bowed
Grotesques which glorified neither God nor man

(Splash)

But there are many other golden calves
And most of them lurking within ourselves
Littering our souls with rubbish and sludge
There’s much in us that needs tossing away

(Splash)

If we stand upon the Ponte San Angelo
And look down to the mud –
                                                 we might see ourselves

"We are a Diverse Collective" - poem

Lawrence Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

“We are a Diverse Collective” 1

Of individualist obedientiaries
Who think for ourselves if others approve
And apologize if others disapprove
And what are we disapproving of today?

We are the brave submissive resistance
Mensheviks this week, Bolsheviks the next
Courageously saying whatever we are told
We write what we think – and is this okay?

And one dare not get too big for their pants
Lest one then lose their corporate grants


1 From an article in Hyperallergic

Super-Dooper Super-Servile Bowl Sunday (or something) - poem

Lawrence Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

This is a re-post with modifications.

Super-Servile Sunday

O sink not down into that corrosive couch
Docile before the Orwellian screen
That regulates the lives of the servile
Dictating dress, demeanor, drink, and dreams

Declare your independence from the sludge
Of vague obedientiaries who drowse
Away their empty lives in submission
To harsh, diagonal inches of rule

Poor weaklings chanting tainted tribal songs
In chorus hamsterable, huddled, heaped
While costumed in their masters’ liveries
And feeling little while thinking even less

The very model of the knee-pants guys
Predictable and dull, submissive ghosts
Crowded, herded through cosmic cattle chutes
Yammering in dim, noisy nothingness

But you –

But you, O you, be not of them, but choose
To be a wanderer in the moonlight
Alone in manly dignity


(The allusions to Milton, Shakespeare, and Keats are deliberate)

Cultural Allusions in JEEVES AND THE FEUDAL SPIRIT - a very brief essay

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

A Few Cultural, Biblical, and Literary Allusions

in Wodehouse's Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

I can add nothing to the many accurate and excellent reviews of Wodehouse’s wonderful Jeeves and Wooster stories. However, on this re-reading I made a few careless notes about cultural, biblical, and literary allusions in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (1954), which include:

Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot – several times
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Sword of Damocles
U.S. Civil War
Kipling - “Gunga Din”
Lot’s Wife
Wordsworth - “Daffodils”
T. S. Eliot
Dostoyevsky
Humphrey Bogart
Tolstoy
Longfellow – “Excelsior”
Flaubert
French Foreign Legion
Groucho Marx
Mae West
Gadarene Swine
P. T. Barnum
Helen of Troy
Balaam’s Ass
Jokes about modern poetry
Robert W. Service
Paul Revere
William Ernest Henley - “Invictus”
Robert Browning
W. H. Auden
Sherlock Holmes
Keats
Sir Philip Sidney
Roget’s Thesaurus
Shakespeare – Hamlet, Othello, Henry V, Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Julius Caesar

And I have surely missed many, many others.

Wodehouse is always therapeutic, but he is also a catalogue of the culture common to English-speaking readers of all nations and social levels in the last century, long before the chants of “Learn to code” (sometimes rendered as “Learn. To. Code.”) blasted civilization away in favor of obedient, unquestioning mechanical servitude.

"Deputies Have Discovered Human Remains" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

“Deputies Have Discovered Human Remains”

-headline

So that’s it, then. Human remains, that’s all
A barefoot child running around the yard
Then choosing what crayon as a favorite color
Learning to carve letters with a Number Two

First tooth, first school, first love, first kiss, first miss
Tricycle, bicycle, school bus, an old car
With a funny pet name, skint knee, toothache
Not understanding why she walked away

And at the end of all those loves and pains –
“Deputies have discovered human remains”

Electric Groundhog - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Electric Groundhog

Electric groundhog – that sounds like the title of a 1960s book of free verse.

However, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) wants an electric groundhog to replace the real groundhog that those old drunks…um…bon vivants in Pennsylvania wake up and display on Candlemas morning.

The bogus tradition is that if the groundhog sees his shadow on Groundhog Day there will be six more weeks of Super Bowl advertisements or something. Thus, for no logical reason, the boys put on funny hats, get tanked…um…merry, go out into the frosty dawn, and rouse a groundhog out of his sleep to observe whether the critter sees his shadow.

If a groundhog can see his shadow, the wobbly old fellows can too, so there is no point to bothering the groundhog.

Sometimes the groundhog also sees it that way. In 2009 New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to hustle a grouchy groundhog into action and was justly bitten.

If that’s not a qualification for the presidency, well, I don’t know what is.

I’m talking about the groundhog, of course.

PETA feels that a groundhog shouldn’t be awakened at dawn, and there are millions and millions of workers who feel exactly the same.

Maybe the Groundhog Groupies could try waking up a sophomore? Now there would be a challenge.

If some mad scientist (“It’s alivvvvve!”) cobbles together an electric groundhog I will be interested in seeing it take a bite out of an electric mayor.

The news about the poor groundhog being awakened before dawn reminds us of this old wheeze:

Mother: “C’mon, child, get up; you’ll be late for school.”

Daughter: “I don’t wanna go to school!”

Mother: “You HAVE to go to school.”

Daughter: “WHYYYYYYY? The teachers don’t like me. The kids at school don’t like me. Even the lunch lady doesn’t like me. WHY do I have to go to school!?”

Mother: “Because you’re the principal, that’s why!”

Cheers!

-30-

But What About the High-Hanging Fruit? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

But What About the High-Hanging Fruit?

The last of the autumn apples, perhaps
Or the long-ago love that passed us by
Never falling to the Telescopic Fruit Picker
From Garrett Wade, $37.50

(I’ve got one of those, and it works just fine)

Or maybe pears, ‘way up among the leaves
Where dreams of better days to come were lost
To the old and tattered bushel-basket
That rotted away in the tractor shed

Then was it wrong to look high up for truth
That flew beyond our reach, our sight, our hopes?

Chat Details - When an Internet Service Suffers Its Own Systems Failure - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Chat Details –
When an Internet Service Suffers Its Own Systems Failure,

and in Which this Scrivener Encounters that Rarity,

a Customer Service Agent with a Brain

Luis Z (9:15:51 PM):

Thank you for contacting (Anapest)
Internet Customer Care. I'm happy
to help you today! Please give me just a
moment to review your account information
and I'll be right with you.


Luis Z (9:16:42 PM):

                                           Hello, Lawrence.
How are you?


Me (9:17:10 PM):

                               Fine, thanks.


Luis Z (9:17:32 PM):

                                                      I see you've contacted
us due you're trying to pay your bill, is that
correct?


Me (9:17:41 PM):

Yes.


Luis Z (9:18:16 PM):

                                       Lawrence, at this time we are
currently experiencing a system outage
which prevents me from accessing your account.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Would you kindly call us back in 2 hours so that
we can complete this transaction once our systems
are back to normal? Is there anything else
that I can assist you with?


Me (9:19:00 PM):

                                               There is an irony

in an internet service unable
to access the internet.


Me (9:19:15 PM):

                                       Thanks for your note,
but in two hours I will be asleep.


Me (9:19:30 PM):

I can try tomorrow morning, if that's okay.


Luis Z (9:20:07 PM):

Thanks


Luis Z (9:20:10 PM):

                   That's okay


Luis Z (9:20:27 PM):

                                           Besides informing you about
the network outage, is there anything else
I can do for you today?


Me (9:20:31 PM):

                                          I trust I
won't be receiving any late / overdue
notices from (Anapest)?


Luis Z (9:21:06 PM):

                                           No


Me (9:21:39 PM):

                                                   Very good.
Thanks.


Luis Z (9:21:50 PM):

Lawrence, it has been a pleasure helping you
out! If there is nothing else I can help
you with at this time, thank you for chatting
with (Anapest) Internet. We appreciate
your business. I hope you have a great day!

An Elegy in January - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

An Elegy in January

For Beverly Jean Keszeg Mixson

of Happy Memory

How very strange that this grey year has passed
In a confusing haste, amorphous and dim
Since that sad January day when life,
All meaning paused, collapsed within itself

Cold February rains fell upon her cairn
But then the happy leaf-time came to bless
That twice-blest earth where memories repose
Warmed by the sun, made golden in the fall

And now the cold has come again

How is it that the seasons flew so fast?
How very strange that one long year has passed

Plimsolls - a little doggerel about boat shoes

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Plimsolls

I didn’t know I was wearing plimsolls
I thought I was wearing tennies
But when I look down at the dim soles -
Plimsolls? Dollars to the pennies!




(When I consider the burdened bathroom scale -
My cargo, too, is at the plimsoll line)

Robin Hood, Whitman Publishing, 1950s - Photograph

The Purpose of Civilization - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poetricdrivel.blogspot.com

The Purpose of Civilization

The apogee of civilization
Is a small boy sitting under a tree
On a summer day reading wonderful stories
About the adventures of Robin Hood

The small boy may well go to university
Fight in the wars, and someday have a boy
Of his own sitting under a summer tree
Reading those stories about Robin Hood

And we must always remember that the point
Of civilization is that small boys
Are free to sit under trees and read stories
About the adventures of Robin Hood

In youth, in books, and in the summer wood -
Finding there the true, the beautiful, the good

Searching for a Lost Cemetery - MePhone Photograph