Friday, July 3, 2020

Isolated from the Book Shop for Four Months - poetry

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Isolated from the Book Shop for Four Months

But maybe not much longer…

A Barnes & Noble is a happy place
Where my book budget goes to lose itself
In the poetry section first, and then
To the music by way of the magazines

A Barnes & Noble is that happy place
Where my weary soul goes to find itself –
And that errant budget – among the shelves
Of civilization in a quiet room

Then coffee and croissants (and a six-foot space!)
Yes, Barnes & Noble is my happy place

Thursday, July 2, 2020

"Your Call is Important to Us" - weekly column

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


“Your Call is Important to Us”

In the garden of my electronic dreams:

1. Electronics manufacturers and service providers would build better stuff and hire more skilled people to make the gadgets work and the electrons flow instead of hiring script-readers who take an hour of the customer’s time to explain in vague terms why nothing is working and somehow infer that it's your fault for not knowing a superheterodyne bus bar from the Tiki Bar, but, hey, “Your call is important to us.”

2. The FCC and the FTC would DO THEIR JOBS about sneaky offshore billing, foreign and domestic scams, tricky contracts, and corporate bullying of the vulnerable.

3. “Tiffany” and “Brian” at customer service would be honest about what their names really are and what country they are calling from, and that they are working at a ‘phone bank for rotten wages because they were never able to pass freshman English.

4. Any service provider saying “Your call is important to us” would not be executed – not for a first offense, that is.

5. Whatever sick, twisted wretch who generated the latest (Famous Brand Name) series of browsers should receive life with only a slim possibility of parole.

6. InterGossip providers would stop LYING about everything.

7. InterGossip service for the rest of us would work as well as it does for rioters.

8. For every minute a customer is on hold he or she receives a dollar off the next bill.

9. Criminals, not police, would have to wear body cams, and if the cameras didn’t work then the U. K. Daily Mail and the electronic mob would presume guilt.

10. There would be no telephone trees (“If you know your extension…”). Just answer the da®ned phone.

11. Every time a customer receives a message saying “All our lines are busy right now…” the president of the company receives a mild electric shock.

12. Customer service representatives would answer the question that was asked, not drift off into an alternative universe.

13. NO ROBOTS (“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that…”).

14. Every time MicroPlop declares a browser outdated (“heritage” or “legacy”), the customer receives a $500 rebate for the nuisance of having to learn the eccentricities of an unnecessary new dashboard which doesn’t work as well as the old one anyway and which loses all your bookmarks and addresses.

15. Every time a tech company says, “You’re due for an upgrade” instead of “We want to sell you a more expensive ‘phone,” someone gets a spanking.

Bonus: Mark Zuckerberg would be arrested for his haircut, and his barber subpoenaed for testimony.

And, hey, your call is important to us.

-30-



Sometimes We Must Wait - MePhone Photograph


Sunflower Apogee - Haiku

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

Sunflower Apogee

The sunflowers droop
And so do we – Midsummer
Is a sleepy time

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Happy Canada Day!

Funny & Cool Canada Day Memes – Memeologist.com



From:

A Casual Conversation with a Goddess - poem

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

A Casual Conversation with a Goddess

What if the moon wants to whisper back to me?
The sky is dark and lonely high up there
Where the goddess sails through an eternally starlit sea
In orbits fixed above earth’s guarded air

Perhaps she is lonely for her brother Helios
And for Endymion, whom she still mourns
And for her sister, dear spritely Eos
Her playfellow in dances to Pan-pipes and horns

What if the moon wants to whisper back to me?
I should listen to her – don’t you agree?

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Karens - poem

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

Karens

I love me my Karens, good, sweet, and kind:
Junior high love-notes and school yard flirtations
The prom date that never happened because
“I really like you – just like a brother”

Karen in the Navy, Karen at work
Karen the artist, Karen in the shop
Karen in her lab coat, Karen in class
Karen the doctor, and Karen the cop

I love me my Karens, good, sweet, and kind:
Dear happy memories, in heart and mind

Monday, June 29, 2020

Not to Decide is to Decide Blah-Blah - poem

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

Not to Decide is to Decide Blah-Blah

Not to decide is to decide indeed
A decision defiant in itself
To stand against all chaos and proclaim:
“I have not decided”

Not to decide is a courageous act
When a false binary demands your soul
Your spirit, your very self, and you respond:
“I decide for myself”

Not to decide is to dismiss a tyrant:
“You are irrelevant”

Sunday, June 28, 2020

Just Wear the Stupid Mask, Okay?

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

Just Wear the Stupid Mask, Okay?

Tiresome, didactic doggerel, but it’s important tiresome, didactic doggerel

Just wear the stupid mask, okay?
Yeah, yeah, we know you’re not afraid
Of any ol’ virus that comes your way
(Says your cousin the almost-nurses’ aide)

And someone on the GossipNet
He said that some doctor somewhere
Said Studies Show (oh, yeah, you bet) 1
That masks let through all sorts of air

Yeah, stud, you’ll take that virus down
Ground it with just one wrestling toss
And run its tentacles out of town:
You’ll show that bug just who is boss!

But

Your Granny’s still weak after surgery
And Uncle’s always short of breath
And children – you wouldn’t want, you see
To let your ego cause a baby’s death



1 Because, like, you know, Studies Show, and who are we to argue with such a reliable source as Studies Show?

Saturday, June 27, 2020

Sunflower and Moon, Dusk, 27 June 2020 - MePhone Photograph


Ships of Theseus - poem

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

Ships of Theseus

Every seven years, some say, we are renewed
In coded sequences not understood
Animal cells, well-timed, within us die
They leave forever, replaced and not refreshed

But even so, our selves are still our selves
And condemnations from the past endure
And praises, too, all of them a little worn
And the remember whens are an ever now

Then what...?

The eternal Wind

The eternal Wind that was before we are
Is the Forever following our little ships

Friday, June 26, 2020

"Let There be Sung 'Non Nobis' and 'Te Deum'" - poem

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

“Let There be Sung ‘Non nobis’ and ‘Te Deum’”

-Henry V

Vultures circle high in the airy blue
At a distance elegant in their sweeps
Far from the planet surface and its sorrows
As if they are searching for eternal truth

In truth they are searching for something dead
A putrid corpse to rip with their foul beaks
A life interrupted, breath stopped by death
A pig, a cow, a snake, a me, a you

That dark and croaking thing of rot and slime:
A vulture is but a messenger of time

Thursday, June 25, 2020

A Woke Editing of Brother Robert Frost - weekly column

(Transferring this drivel to the InterGossip made a mess of the formatting, but it was pretty much a mess before it got here.)


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

A Woke Editing of Brother Robert Frost

Several statues of Robert Frost grace our land, none of which has yet been mistaken for a Confederate general, but hey, that’s coming.

In anticipation of sculptures of one of our greatest poets being supplanted by animatronic images of, oh, Lenin or Stalin or Miley Cyrus’ get-thee-hence twerking for the cause of understanding that the coronavirus was here first, we must re-write Robert Frost for the sensitivities of the year of the common era 2020. Herein follows a Robert Frost poem beaten into submission and correct thought.

And, hey, DEFUND IAMBIC TETRAMETER!

Stopping Without Permission
by The People’s Scientific Forest on a Global Warming Evening

Whose Collective Scientific Forest this is we think we know
Their Kolkhoz is in The People’s Village, though
They will not see us slacking off our assigned labors unsupervised
To watch The People’s Collective Scientific Forest fill up with global warming

Our collective’s little horse must think it somewhat un-soviet
To stop without The People’s Assigned Living Spaces near
Between The People’s Collective Scientific Forest and global warming lake
The least comradely evening of the second year of our latest five-year-plan

He / She / They gives his / her / their Red Star harness bells a shake
To accuse us of some un-comradely lapse in focusing on our delegated purpose
The only other sound’s the Woodcutters’ Collective Choir, singing our new
          international anthem, Comrade Lennon’s “Imagine,”
And global warming wind and Twitter directives

The Collective Scientific Forest is utilitarian and properly gridded, and serves
          The Working People
But we have our comradely oaths and work assignments to keep
And kilometers to go before we take our assigned rest in our assigned bunks
And kilometers to go before we take our assigned rest in our assigned bunks

-30-

Dentistry Again - poem with lots of self-pity

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

Dentistry Again

Anaesthesia slowly passing from me
Dragging the pain of yesterday along
The muffled echoings of imaginings
Colliding with synapses in the dark

Thinking little beyond a coffee cup
And less upon the pages of a book
With thoughts all scrambled the pages back
And through vague eyes into my foggy brain

How difficult to force even a clumsy rhyme
This ordinary Tuesday in ordinary time

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Bees Disapprove of Us - poem

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

Bees Disapprove of Us

There’s nothing the bees care to learn from us
We talk to them anyway in our idleness
Having put away the hose or the rake
We’re in the mood to gab for a little while

But Calvinist bees fly impatiently by
From flower to water to office-hive
To check their quotas and hum their reports
Then speed back to their favorite flowered fields

They disapprove of us indolent men
And so rebuke us for our slothy sin

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

A Viking Funeral for a Fisherman - Frivolous Doggerel

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

A Viking Funeral for a Fisherman

When I die:

Just place my body in my old bass boat
With a cooler of beer at my sneakered feet
And anchor me with an old fishing float
Secured with a bowline to the forward cleat

In my left hand place my best Shakespeare reel
And in my right a stinky old cigar
Saint Peter’s Fish in my dad’s wicker creel
Then point the boat’s prow to the brightest star

It’s now the fishes’ turn; I’ll be their food
Powered off to Glory by an Evinrude

Monday, June 22, 2020

The Theory and Practice of Summer - poem

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

The Theory and Practice of Summer

June is Dairy Month

Summer is better in theory than in practice:
Watermelon days barefootin’ in the shade
Pole-fishing for perch in the neighbor’s pond
Oak-tree afternoons lost in a library book

Oh, no

Up before dawn to get the milk cows in
Fence-building blisters in the prickly heat
Pulling the weeds in Mama’s garden plot
And hauling to the barn late August hay

Oh, yes

Summer’s not what it could be, as a rule
But still it’s good because there ain’t no school!

Sunday, June 21, 2020

The More Up to Date a Book is... MePhone Photograph

The more "up to date" a book is, the sooner it will be dated.

-C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

Negative Capability - poem

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

Negative Capability in a Basket
 
Negative capability is not
A basket that bore hens’ eggs yesterday
And will carry tomatoes tomorrow
Is not empty today
 
An empty basket is a positive space
Which is laden with possibilities
A book, a dream a hope, a picnic lunch
And thus quite full today
 
There is no emptiness within its rands
Slews
Wales
Stakes
Bye-stakes
Upsetts
Fitches
For we will fill our baskets with good things

Saturday, June 20, 2020

From John Wayne to Spike Lee - poem

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

From John Wayne to Spike Lee

From John Wayne to Spike Lee, we who were there
Are set upon gaming boards or movie screens
For the artistic outrage of award winners
Choosing their costumes for the Oscars show

Arms makers, double-entry contractors
Artists, writers, cinema studios
Everybody seems to have profited
From the war where they sent us to disappear

But we are left dying for appointments
with the VA
                          who might finish the job