Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Water at Camp
Lejeune
And the water in Viet-Nam, chlorinated muck
Flavored with Agent Orange and other guck
Was good enough for us – that’s our tough luck!
Saturday, September 3, 2022
The Water at Camp Lejeune - doggerel
Friday, September 2, 2022
Editors Who Checklist Poets - poem (a poem about poetry - that's redundant, eh!)
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Editors Who Checklist
Poets
A Poet’s Autobiography is his Poetry
-Yevtushenko
A poem is itself
So I’m not going to play any victim cards
I’m not even seated in their game
Ticking self-pity boxes is their game
Not mine
A poem is itself
I am not anyone’s propagandist
All are free to read a poem or not
Like it or not for its artistry and craft
(Or lack
thereof)
But I won’t be a confessional professional
A poem is itself
A worthy editor is a pearl beyond price
But a literary commissar is nekul'turnyy
For a poem is itself
Thursday, September 1, 2022
Self-Government in the United States with Tats and Extra Fries - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Self-Government in
the United States with Tats and Extra Fries
“Here, sir, The People rule.”
-Numerous attributions
I blame the Russians. And people who read books.
And that pornography in these here schools
The Navy SEALS is actually Lizard People
I only know what Q told me, okay?
I seen them suitcases of electoral votes
For the junior high cheerleading squad
It was stolen, I tell ya! Sarah Palin rocks!
It’s all in the Bible, you Commie-freak
Secret U.N. observers occupy our town
And that is why the InterGossip’s down
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Cockroaches and Cold-Callers - rhyming doggerel
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Cockroaches and Cold-Callers
We honor life as part of God’s creation
Its good is an objective reality
Cruelty to animals is an abomination
(Though a cockroach we flush with fiendish glee)
“Hi, this is Heather; we’re taking a survey…”
There are variations on this Leaden Rule
For if you haven’t sent a cockroach down the loo
(This practice should be taught in every school)
An telephone cold-caller will certainly do
“Good morning! We’re giving away free siding…”
Thus you may WOOOOSH! a swindler or a roach
Completely free of any self-reproach
“This isn’t a sales call; we only want to ask…”
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
As Neatly Packaged as a Letter-Bomb - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Brilliance of
Propaganda
“Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent
under it”
-Lady Macbeth
We
have seen vituperation beautifully expressed
In
the most elegant meter and rhyme
Wild
shriekings crafted with an artist’s skill
And
as neatly packaged as a letter-bomb
Monday, August 29, 2022
Sunday, August 28, 2022
Silencing Rooster Cogburn - weekly column, 28 August 2022
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Silencing Rooster
Cogburn
True Grit appeared on the Orwellian telescreen the
other night, and I found myself watching that wonderful film yet again.
The climax of the film comes when John Wayne as Marshal Rooster
Cogburn confronts Robert Duvall’s Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang. After a few prefatory
remarks of ritual verbal abuse, Ned sneeringly demands that Rooster state his
intentions or get out of the way.
“I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged
in Fort smith at Judge Parker’s convenience,” replies Rooster. “Which’ll it be?”
After some wonderfully Snidely Whiplash laughter from the
desperadoes, Ned taunts Rooster with, “I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat
man!”
And then comes The Moment – The Moment, The Academy Award
Moment - when Rooster challenges Ned and his entire gang with perhaps the most
famous line in the history of cinema…
But the line was not spoken; The Moment never came.
The center, the axis, the climax of this great film was silenced
for television by some officious busy-body.
While Rooster spins his rifle in a menacing manner and Ned
and the lads are laughing at him, let us pause and consider the insensitivities
that have preceded this moment in True Grit:
1.
Tom Chaney murders Mattie’s father with a gutshot.
2.
Three prisoners are hanged on the courthouse
square before a mocking crowd which includes children
3.
A federal marshal repeatedly handles prisoners
with inappropriate roughness and occasional brutality.
4.
A Chinese character is stereotyped, although we
must admit that he gives the marshal a good what-fer when necessary.
5.
There is some casual stereotyping of American
Indians.
6.
The body count in the film would require a statistician,
and the deaths are gruesome.
7.
Several adults threaten the life of a child.
8.
A child shoots an adult.
9.
As for Mattie’s snide remarks about Texas
senators and bird dogs, we should let them stand with some sympathy for bird
dogs.
Dozens die in the film, but That Line, that Academy Award
line without which the story would fail to be true to the vision of the book’s
author and the artistry of the film’s professionals, must apparently not be
spoken lest it give offense to the delicate among us.
Look, the metaphor Rooster uses in the uncut version is
pretty rough, and on the lips of almost anyone else would come across as
adolescent potty-mouth-ness. But in the context of this great film and as
spoken by John Wayne, yep, it’s a work of art.
But what about the children who might hear it?
The prime duty in raising a child belongs to the parent.
Thus, the parent must guide his (the pronoun is
gender-neutral) child’s cultural experiences.
After all, it is pointless and indeed hypocritical to
give a child unrestricted access to a MePhone or the InterGossip and then demand
that a cinema, an author, an artist, a public library, a museum, or other
cultural milieux surrender their freedom of cultural exchanges with other
adults.
In sum, know when to turn off the television in your own
house. That’s your decision, not someone else’s
-30-
An Extended Warranty - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
An Extended
Warranty
You buy something and the man behind the counter
Asks you if you want to pay extra for a warranty
And when you ask why, doesn’t the gadget work
He’s grumpily ready for you to move on
Most things in life don’t have extended warranties:
Love, Hershey bars, tree frogs on the window screen
The John Wayne movie machine that broke long ago
But memories of MeeMaw are always fresh
You live through pain, and He who is beyond the stars
Gives it meaning – that’s the warranty
Saturday, August 27, 2022
Trust the Official Texas State God - That's an Order
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Trust the Official
Texas State God – That’s an Order
Some say
“All of us worship the same god, you know”
But what makes them think that this is so?
Is ‘In God We Trust’ an assertion of Christian nationalism or of American history in public schools? – Baptist News Global
Texas schools hanging 'In God We Trust' signs after new state law requiring donated signs be posted | Fox News
Thoreau-ly August - doggerel about the heat
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Thoreau-ly
August
“The mass of
men live lives of quiet desperation,”
Protested
Thoreau in hopeless exasperation.
One would not
enter into disputation
With a famous
writer of great reputation
But
Alas that here
our lives are rank perspiration!
-
From The Road to Magdalena, 2012
(Available
on amazon)
Friday, August 26, 2022
Allusions to DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, Patrick McGoohan's THE PRISONER, Kafka, Orwell, and Mordor
Dear Anonymous Google Accuser:
Thank you for your note, the contents of
which sound much like the block warden’s caution (“Your attitude is noticed,
comrade.”) to Yuri in the film version of Doctor Zhivago.
I have re-read the column, which I wrote
nine years ago, and find nothing offensive in it (although it is rather
puerile), nor do you detail exactly what is offensive in it and why I should be
sanctioned. You are being Kafka-esque, and I say this as someone who has read
Kafka: you do not tell me what offense I have purportedly committed nor do you face
me with an accuser. You do not even face me with you, for you do not give your
name. You employ the passive voice in referring to an “Adult Content policy” and
to “Community Guidelines,” which sounds like something from an episode of
Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner: “The Committee won’t like this, Number
Six.”
Google (and one could find “google”
offensive, with its history mocking someone’s physical characteristics) is a
private company, and so is free to publish or not publish, as is only
right. And I am free to pity Google for
moral, ethical, and literary cowardice.
I was raised in situational poverty,
barely graduated from high school, and spent 18 months in Viet-Nam. Upon
returning to the USA (with life-long skin cancer which the DVA denies) I worked
straight nights (double shifts on weekends) as an ambulance driver and later an
LVN to put myself through university. I taught for almost forty years in public
school, community college, and university as an adjunct instructor of no status
whatsoever. In retirement I volunteered with our local school’s reading program
until the Covid ended that, and I still volunteer with the lads at the local prison.
I volunteer in community cleanup after our hurricanes (tho’ I’m getting a
little old for that). I’ve worked hard all my life, paid my taxes, paid off my
house at age 70, receive only half of my Social Security because of some vague
law, and never gamed the system. Indeed, I would say that the system has gamed
me.
And was all of this so that some frightened
committee of anonymous inquisitors staring at an Orwellian telescreen or a
Mordor-ish Palantir could find an innocuous scribble insensitive?
Pffffft.
Sincerely,
Lawrence Hall
Thursday, August 25, 2022
Pontifex Minimus - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Pontifex Minimus
I met a man who once
lived under a bridge
He said that was when
he was happiest
But he found Jesus and
civilization
So they put him in
prison
He likes having a bed
and three meals each day
But he misses his
bridge
A Woman Hollering and a Train Passing By - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
A Woman Hollering
and a Train Passing By
Next to the post office sags a trailer house
Where a fat old woman in a onesie
Was grilling something in her littered yard
Maybe some hot dogs, or just some dogs
A cigarette bounced about on her lip
As she screamed at me for driving by her life
Possibly she thought I was after her beer cans
Or her virtue, or her front-porch couch
A Santa Fe freight blew by, obscuring her words
And I accelerated, escaping her sorrows
Wednesday, August 24, 2022
The Prince-Poet-Cat of Gatineau, Quebec - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Prince-Poet-Cat
of Gatineau, Quebec
For Pushkin, of Happy Memory
And His House Pets Abbie and Alexander
In an ice-cream summer in the long ago
I met a marvelous cat in Gatineau
Pushkin by name, a fastidious Russian
His shiny fur coat never needed brushin’
He purred in an elegant iambic tetrameter
Precisely in its orderly parameter
A cat, of course, needn’t meter his speech
For a cat is a poem whose motions teach:
Running
Leaping
Sleeping
Purring
pouncing
Growling
Yowling
Howling
Twitching
Lurking
Sneaking
Posing
Dreaming
Snuggling
While in all things giving his children delight
In an ice-cream summer in the long ago
I met a marvelous cat in Gatineau
Monday, August 22, 2022
if We Change Channels All the Pain Will Go Away - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
If We Change Channels
All the Pain Will Go Away
Captors are shooting trembling prisoners of war
We can watch them writhing as they die
Screaming silently into our telescreens
American Idol is on 282
Saturday, August 20, 2022
Are We but Obscure Lines in Ezekiel? - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Are We but Obscure
Lines in Ezekiel?
Maybe we are doing time along the Chebar
But we are not in Babylonian captivity
Only in the captivity of our choices:
We fouled our own endeavors, our own lives
We banned and burned our books, our music, our art
Upon the orders of megaphone fuhrers
Sacrificing Truth on their altars of fear
We abandoned duty and found ourselves alone
Dry bones, dry bones in a desert of despair
But, shush – what is that Sound from over there…?
Friday, August 19, 2022
Whatever Happened to Clarence Eustace Scrubb? - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Whatever Happened
to Clarence Eustace Scrubb?
He
liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain
elevators
or
of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.
-C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
He was so good at banning ideas that later
They made him a Texas school administrator
Keller ISD to remove challenged books | The Texas
Tribune
(You will of course remember that in Mr. Lewis' wonderful book Scrubb became a fine young man at the end. There is also hope for book banners, book banners, and censorious old biddies of both sexes - may their eyes open soon to the joys of 10,000 years of literature!)
Thursday, August 18, 2022
Strippers Bid to Unionize in Los Angeles - rhyming couplet
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Strippers Bid to
Unionize in Los Angeles
-news item
To what enormity is this action owed –
Could there be an issue with the strict dress code?
Wednesday, August 17, 2022
Veterans' Cremation Benefits - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Veterans’
Cremation Benefits
-Ad on the InterGossip
AMTRACS with gas tanks beneath the floor
White phosphorus grenades gone bad, gone wrong
The Parrot’s Beak burning throughout the night
Napalm, burning flesh, screams, horror, death
A burnt man flailing about in agony
And where the hell is that dust-off now?
Copper sulphate, Sulfamylon, Kerlix, Telfa pads
We know about cremation well enough
But now tell us about our benefits
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
A Librarian is Your Fairy Godmother - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
A Librarian is Your
Fairy Godmother
For Miss Kelly,
Who Captured the Castle
A librarian is your fairy godmother
Who blesses her children with the gift of books
Her magic wand is a date-due stamp
Which just for you she will then ignore
She lives with brave Cassie in Mississippi
And in the greenwood with bold Robin Hood
On Wildcat Island, in Narnia and Middle-Earth -
She sails you there on bean-bag pirate ships
And if you’re nice to others (so please don’t tickle)
There might be a gift of watermelon pickle!
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