Sailing a Couch into History - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Sailing a Couch into History

 

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny, but what we put into it is ours.

 

-Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, p. 51

 

Through eating, fatting, sleeping, video games

En couchant in a stasis ossified

By the low expectations of the zeitgeist

(“What’s a zeitgeist?”) some flail into history

 

The ironic echoes of Call of Duty

Flatten against an empty ‘tater-chip bag        

Yesterday flung into the baby’s crib

(“Ain’t no one seen little Shawnee today?”)

 

His MePhone case is manly hunter green

He's checkin’ out the fantasies on a glowing screen

In the Foggy Dawn - a Hawk on a Fencepost

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

In the Foggy Dawn - a Hawk on a Fencepost

 

For him the hayfield is his restaurant

A baby mouse, perhaps, or a tasty rabbit

But I prefer a bacon-egg-cheese croissant -

For breakfast we are all creatures of habit!

What Do These Teachers Teach These Children in These Schools? - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

 

What Do These Teachers Teach These Children in These Schools?

 

PETA thinks this is how farmers get the wool off sheep? 😂 | Not the Bee

 

Sheep-shearing isn’t a topic in English class

Not here in cattle country; we give sheep a pass

You're Going to Be Okay - poem

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

You’re Going to Be Okay

 

You’re going to be okay

Your feet hit the deck this morning

You offered up that cup of coffee to God

And He delighted in your happiness

My Illegal Oxygen-ish Apple Watch - doggerel

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

(Photograph taken 23 August 2023)

My Illegal Oxygen-ish Apple Watch

 

Apple WILL be banned from selling smartwatches in the US from TOMORROW over claims it stole medical tech - after court rejected tech giant's appeal | Daily Mail Online

 

My Apple Watch ™ © ® has the oxygen feature –

Do I confess to the Law? Or to the preacher?

(My Apple Watch worked fine until it was messed up by the last two updates, which cannot be undone. When this thing fails completely I will find a cheap knockoff on amazon.)

Awaiting Cataract Surgery (Catchy title, eh!)

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Awaiting Cataract Surgery

 

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

 

- attributed to C. S. Lewis and others

 

I will give up my books

When someone pries my cold, dead hands from them

Companions of my youth, tellers of truth

Next to my heart when the mortar rounds fell

 

But now I see the world

As through a dark lens darkly, well enough

For most common household purposes

But those dear words on any page – not so

 

I never thought I’d say

That I’m looking forward to surgery day!

Our Former President Loves Us All - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Our Former President Loves Us All

 

The People grant him power; he grasps for more

He asks them for their votes and for their deaths

His eunuchs tell us that it was just a joke

Like Two Corinthians walking into a bar

 

But when the folding chairs are folded away

And that one night of transient glory is over

The caucus captains and their caps depart

Cheap souvenirs tatted in white and gold

 

They stumble home through limousine fumes and ice:

“For a moment I was Somebody – it was nice”

A Government Church?

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Government Church?

 

We establish no religion in this country. We command no worship. We mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are and must remain separate.

 

- President Ronald Reagan, Speech in Temple Hillel, Valley Stream, New York,

26 October 1984

 

Each American may his own conscience search

For by the Grace of God we have no national church

 

Cf. The Constitution, Article VI and Amendment I

To Accept Israel - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

To Accept Israel

 

“Israel was not created in order to disappear - Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom.”

 

– President John F. Kennedy)

 

To deny Israel is to curse ourselves

For we are inheritors of the Covenant

That He should be our God, and we His people

He creates us, He calls us – this is so

 

He has given us prophecy and law

Cattle in the fields, fish in all the seas

And lovers, flowers, sunsets, songs, salvation

The Great Dance of Creation - and Himself

 

Let not the sinister whisperer divide us!

To accept Israel is to accept - everyone

An English Major Screaming at a Wall Clock - poem (and a mostly-true story)

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

An English Major Screaming at a Wall Clock

 

(A French officer would be too well-mannered to do that)

 

Passing from one office to another in quest

Of some elusive official signature

I saw a woman screaming at a clock

And heard her, too, because screams are like that

 

“She’s an English major,” someone said in explanation

“She and her boy Wordsworth are at it again

And meddlesome Coleridge keeps putting his oar in”

I nodded in understanding; Milton had mentioned it

 

A scholar should never scream at institutional clocks;

He should discreetly disapprove of them

Garage-Sale Rolodex for Seventy-Five Cents - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Garage-Sale Rolodex® for Seventy-Five Cents

 

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed,

debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.

 

-Patrick McGoohan as Number Six in The Prisoner

 

The Rolodex was once a symbol of power

Of knowledge marshalled into sequences

Orderly sequences alphabetized by names

By names and cross indices of subjects and dates

 

Of enemies or allies or contacts, rarely friends

Condensed in ink on smoothly finished cards

Restrained in place by colored plastic tabs

Awaiting the stroke of an office tyrant’s hand

 

The Rolodex was subsumed within The ‘Phone

Thus still your life cannot be called your own

A Third Couplet for the Coup

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Third Couplet for the Coup

 

The president’s son humiliated our representatives -

They’re as useless as gas-station pregnancy preventatives

Another Couplet for the Coup

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Another Couplet for the Coup

 

Presidents and their bangers bully judges, you see

So the laws apply only to you and me

He Won't Even Notice - a Bitter Couplet for the Coup

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

He Won’t Even Notice - a Bitter Couplet for the Coup

 

They cry that he is anointed of Jesus, that he saves

(His limousine will rumble over their poor graves)

Upon the Return of Artifacts to Wounded Knee - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Upon the Return of Artifacts to Wounded Knee

 

“We hope the spirits are on their way now.”

 

-Richard Broken Nose

 

A knife, a needle, an arrow, a pair of shoes

Some beads, a shirt, a drum, a tobacco pouch

A little girl’s doll, fragments of a pot

And tools for completing one’s daily chores

 

They are not artifacts; they are not displays

They are the ordinary necessities of life

Stolen from the dead hands of innocents

To be numbered, indexed, filed, boxed, and mocked

 

These things are sacred now, part of the Great Dance of Creation

We pray the spirits will come and take them home

 

As plundered items return to Wounded Knee, decisions await (artdaily.com)

Endsville - didacticism not at its best

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Endsville

 

All in all, at the end of the day, and in conclusion, when the curvy lady sings, when the truth be told, when all is said and done, when the chickens come home to roost, when all the evidence is in, in sum, in short, in brief, the bottom line is, we can only conclude, to conclude, in the end, so as I said before, to sum up, and as Churchill / Gandhi / Harry Potter / a wise man once said, therefore, all things considered, most importantly, taking the facts into account, to wrap things up, on the whole, and most importantly, and finally…

 

(I was going somewhere with this…)

Polysyllabic Aspirational Bourgeois Vanity (and, like, stuff) - poem (of a sort)

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Polysyllabic Aspirational Bourgeois Vanity

(and, like, stuff)

 

Surrealism

 

A melting clock is not aesthetically pleasing

Nor is it of any utility

It celebrates chaos instead of life

And bullies us with a manifesto

 

Surrealism

 

Gives pale aesthetes topics for their idle hours

Surrendering imagination to cliches’

The endlessly self-referential I, I, me, me

(Another double-latte, if you please)

 

Surrealism

 

The republican’s derivative art is but

The emperor’s new clothes turned inside out

 

 

(And have you seen my serial takes on Greek ikons re-imagined and re-envisioned as diatomic forms through vegan egg-tempera on recycled barn wood as a repudiation of hidebound colonialist oppressivist occupationist Orthodoxy by sequencing monks on Mount Athos as agnostic Jewish fast-food workers influenced by the works of Dali and the Rapallo poets through a motif of running wedges in asymmetric lines from a cosmopolitan image of Heaven to a day-glow Wal-Mart beside a sea of transcendental bubbles which symbolize my feelings when my latest grant was canceled? Hmmmmmmm? Of course the straights don’t get it; their lack of imagination is why they stopped The People’s funding I deserve so that I can make great art chiding them for being dullard capitalist mechanicals. I do take all major credit cards for my works.)

End. Stops. Employed. As. Arguments. - poem (of a sort)

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

End. Stops. Employed. As. Arguments.

 

Learn. To. Code. You. Had. One. Job. End. Of. Fact.

Decolonize. This. Place. Best. Job. Ever.

Burn. It. Down. Get. A. Job. Not. In. Our. Name.

Not. My. King. Not. My President. Spot. On.

 

Worst. Day. Ever. Votes. Have. Consequences.

What. Could. Go. Wrong. It. Begins. Heads. Will. Roll.

O. M. G. Let. It. Go. This. Isn’t. Over.

Come. And. Take. It. Not. Just. Shut. Up. Just. No.

 

 

Shut. It. Down. Let. It. Go. I. Have. No. Words.

This. Ends. Now. End. Of. Story. Grow. Up. Full. Stop.

 

The Elections of 2024 - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Elections of 2024

 

How sharply our children will be ashamed…

remembering how in so strange a time

common integrity could look like courage

 

-Yevtushenko, “Talk”

 

1. Thesis (of a sort)

 

The nation shamble-shuffles erratically

Erratically to a lectern and microphone

A microphone on a Potemkin stage

While a bewildered audience feebly applauds

 

2. Antithesis (of a sort)

 

The nation lemming-marches along the streets

Lemming-marches along with bullhorns and flags

Bullhorns bellowing in 5.56

The Gospel according to Saint QAnon

 

3. Recusancy instead of synthesis

 

But I am an American, not a D, an R, a Q

My faith is in the Constitution, and maybe

                                                       In you

I Demanded to be Heard - short poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

I Demanded to be Heard

 

When I was young I demanded to be heard

And I was not heard, which turned out for the best

Because I had almost nothing to say

And that almost-nothing was sodden with cliché