Stopping by Literary Interpretations on a Snowy Evening - shallow rhyming doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Stopping by Literary Interpretations on a Snowy Evening

 

From an idea by a friend in Thailand

 

Whose Deconstructionist Narrative this is I think I know

Their (because we mustn’t say “her” or “his”)

New Criticism is on their podcast, though

They will not see me applying Phenomenology here

To help fill up their woods with Neo-Post-Colonialist blow

 

My little solar car must think it other-gendered

To pause while I Conceptualize without a Starbuck’s near

Between Foucault and Derrida here

Next to the Sapir-Whorf Theory, and without a beer

 

They give their location transponder a Derrida shake

To demand a formal apology for this cultural mistake

The only other sound’s the Existential creep

Of Masonic Catholic Nazi Zionism on the take

 

Judgmental stereotypes are flying, shallow and cheap

But I have an Inner Reality to keep

And an Intertextual Analysis of Post-Structuralism to steep

And an Aesthetic Objectification of Dialectics to steep

As You Sometimes Remind Me - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

As You Sometimes Remind Me

 

 

One day I'll suddenly recall:
The sun exists!

 

-Pasternak, “About These Poems”¹

 

 

When the world focuses on a sheet of paper

In a little room where hopes have come to die

The pen can’t write out a prescription for life

Or limn the remedies for a fallen world

 

We begin our days as did Pasternak

A cup of tea against the fear, the fear

Unsure of the conflicting daily edicts

The babblings about ballrooms, tariffs, and arrests

 

Pasternak opened a window to light and fair

 

And to the children playing in the snow he cried,

“My dears, what century is it outside?”

 

 

¹Translations vary

I Am Spartacus! (Okay, Maybe Not) - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

I Am Spartacus! (Okay, Maybe Not)

 

I am not Spartacus!

I don’t wanna die!

No, really, let’s discuss

The death of some other guy!

A Variation on the Privacy Tour - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Variation on the Privacy Tour

 

We Ask Everyone to Respect Our Family’s Privacy

Except for the Go Fund Me everyone will see

And the reception at the Something Hall, date and time

And the Go Fund Me everyone will see

 

And the visitation, date and time

And the Go Fund Me everyone will see

And the services at Our Lady of Something, date and time

And the Go Fund Me everyone will see

 

And the interment at Something Cemetery, date and time

And the Go Fund Me everyone will see

And the scholarship fundraiser

And the Go Fund Me everyone will see

The Strange Adventure of Tarzan, the Epsteinian Files, and The Burn-Bags of Opar - perfectly awful doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Strange Adventure of Tarzan, the Epsteinian Files,

and The Burn-Bags of Opar

 

I am not at liberty to lay before the inquiring minds of an objective public the manner in which the curious document and chilling testimony below came into my possession except that this was through the offices of a mysterious midnight visitor on business from Porlock with a wooden leg and an ivory eye of curious and antique design – or was that an ivory leg and a wooden eye? – and I must assure the reader that it was the visitor from Porlock who made do with a tapping ivory eye and a sightless wooden leg or sightless eye and tapping artificial leg, not the pleasant village of Porlock, because English villages are possessed of streets and lanes, not eyes and legs, on a stormy night at the time of the equinoctial gales when ships put to sea knowing that they (the crews, not the ships) must place their lives into the hands of our merciful and loving God who knoweth all things and disposeth all things and so now pray take a seat and light your pipe while I set my spectacles aright and read to you this strange narrative entrusted to my discretion and, like, stuff:

 

The Strange Adventure of Tarzan, The Epsteinian Files,

 and The Burn-Bags of Opar

 

In search of The Lost Epsteinian Files

Tarzan slipped into a city ruinous and far

And in a secret tunnel that ran for miles

Stumbled onto The Burn-Bags of Opar

 

Queen Kristi of Opar, long in love with Tarzan

Sacrificed to her gods a dog and a goat

Then in an armored golf cart chased him as far as she can

          (Okay, then, you try to rhyme “Tarzan”)

To the edge of the Alligator Alcatraz moat

 

Tarzan, exhausted, thought he was a doomer

Kristi was sharpening her sacrificial knife

          (or loading her thirty-thirty; the records are unclear)

But she was death-whispered by Laura Loomer

Thus saving the burn-bags and our hero’s life

 

And The Epsteinian Files?  The mystery no longer abodes -

The scripts for Gilligan’s Island, the lost episodes

"Just One More Thing" - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

“Just One More Thing”

 

His shabby raincoat

His rumply old suit and tie

His “Just one more thing…”

Minefield and Altar - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Minefield and Altar

 

Approaching the Truth should be simple enough

But you can expect to lose a lot of pals

The maps you were given are unreliable

Because the chain of command keeps changing them

 

No matter what choices you make in the bush

Someone in authority will tell you you’re wrong

If you show initiative you will be wrong

If you follow orders you will still be wrong

 

If you survive you will be too late for chow

And the leaders steal your medals anyhow

A Point-and-Won't-Shoot Camera - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Point-and-Won’t-Shoot Camera

 

The concept of the point-and-shoot camera obtains

But a Me-‘Phone camera doesn’t see it that way

I stopped to watch a bug-grazing bird

Who approached me as if she wanted to visit

 

I took out my Me-‘Phone for a photograph

And it didn’t recognize my handsome face

And I had to tap a four-digit code

And the bird grew suspicious and flew away

 

O Egret, in your beautiful brown and white -

I truly understand your need for flight

High-Pressure Dome in a Coffee Cup - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

High-Pressure Dome in a Coffee Cup

 

Blue light - an illusion of comfort at dawn

The streaky windows frame a winter day

Illusions and delusions lying to us

For this is July, when hopes wither and die

 

The sun’s tentacles ripple across the fields

One of them slithers to your window and leers

Mocking the fantasies of your air-conditioned sleep

Beckoning you outside: come and be fried

 

The sun’s hot streakings, mortals seeking, they roam

As summer’s slithering death: a high-pressure dome

A Three-Character-Group Code for Advancing Civilization

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Three-Character-Group Code for Advancing Civilization

 

Learn. To. Dostoyevsky.

They. Learned. To. Code. - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

They. Learned. To. Code.

 

14-year-old boy identified as victim in University of New Mexico dorm shooting

 

 

I call, therefore, a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform, justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.

 

-John Milton, “Of Education,” 1644

 

 

Learn. To. Code. is the fashionable chant

Staccato’d in every callow response

Make. America. Great. through cliché’ and cant

To force a lath-and-plaster renaissance

 

The Great Conversation of books and thoughts

The Great Dialectic of civilization

Are now toys, guns, and video games, all for nought

Ferality within a generation

 

Within a generation, within a blink

They. Learned. To. Code.

                                       They did not learn to think

The Apex Predator - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Apex Predator

 

They…

Have watched me rise from the darkness of war

Dripping with my enemies’ blood

 

-Beowulf, trans. Raffel, lines 151-153

 

 

The apex predator feeds upon the flesh

Of those who wanted desperately to live

To hew and chew and gnaw and digest and mesh

With those who died with no desire to forgive

 

The apex predator feeds while others starve

The sentient flee from him in grievous fear

But he always wins, his victims then to carve

In bloody fields and haunted forests drear

 

War ends violently in drang und sturm

And the apex predator is obviously

                                                          The Worm

We Ask Everyone to Respect Our Family Privacy at This Time - a poem about the guy who bit the head off the bat

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

We Ask Everyone to Respect Our Family Privacy at This Time

 

“Our family privacy” – people keep saying that

A friend came over and mowed my rankling lawn

Because finding a lawnmower mechanic these days

Is like searching for a unicorn in a shopping mall

 

Their family privacy – I’m blessed with friends

But lawnmower mechanics seem to be extinct

The temp today was 98 at noon

Nobody chants “Learn. To. Code.” anymore

 

Their family privacy – chicken pot pies

Are on sale at Brookshire’s for 88 cents

I’ll mail all those bills this afternoon

That’s a really nice shirt you’re wearing today

 

Their family privacy – a middle-aged woman

Sheds tears upon an altar of VHS tapes

 

In privacy

A 5-7-5 About Listening to Your Body - yes, a 5-7-5 unworthy of a senryu

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A 5-7-5 About Listening to Your Body

 

I listen to my body

All day, all night (Mary Ann)

If I eat too much

Piso Mojado Sounds Somewhat Vulgar - rhyming doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Piso Mojado Sounds Somewhat Vulgar

 

Piso mojado en Tejas y Colorado

Does not exactly trip from my English tongue

Cuidado that floor in El Dorado

For piso sounds slippily close to dung!

Loose Vowels - not really a poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Loose Vowels

 

A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y – why?

(Asking for a dipthong)

The New Pastor Threatens the Congregation with Guitars - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The New Pastor Threatens the Congregation with Guitars

 

Our new pastor has visions, dreams beyond the stars

At Mass last week he informally presented

This suggestion: a choir. And guitars

But peace will still obtain, tho’ that twanging jars -

Guitars in church are why ear plugs were invented

Betrayed With a Kiss-Cam - poem

 

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Betrayed With a Kiss-Cam

 

 

And the sunlight clasps the earth

And the moonbeams kiss the sea:

What is all this sweet work worth

If thou kiss not me?

 

-Shelly, “Love’s Philosophy”

 

 

A kiss is just a kiss, as Dooley Wilson sang

In a Casablanca that never was

A kiss to give one’s life a bit of tang

A kiss to set a lonely heart abuzz

 

But great unwashed mobs stacked in their masses

Close-looped in a failed sub-culture of dust

Metal in their noses and tattoos on their asses

Can never find truth without a trace of trust

 

For love can never depend upon

The vigilante cruelty of a jumbo-tron

 

 

Tech company Astronomer launches investigation into 'kiss cam' moment at Coldplay concert - ABC News

The Crown of Rachel - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Crown of Rachel

 

 

From an idea inspired by Nat Lipstadt while we discussing something else

 

 

A dream about our teacher Akiva of Yavna

When the Romans took a respite from murdering us:

In our youth we approached a little house

Though we were tired from following the goats all day

 

Akiva was tired from tending his beans

And from Jacob-wrestling with great ideas

But he smiled and asked what he could do

Do for us little children bubbling with questions

 

“I am inventing the synagogue,” he might have said

“What is a synagogue? A new kind of Temple?”

“It is a machine for learning, a temple of the mind

A school, an altar upon we sacrifice our ignorance”

 

“But the Romans won’t let us sacrifice anything”

“Sometimes” said Akiva wryly, “they sacrifice us

But in the synagogue we will have a little light

Light and Torah and learning, always learning”

 

“We want to learn.”

 

“Oh? And what do you want to learn?” he asked of us

 

“We want to learn.”

 

He smiled and sat us at a table under his vines

“I learned to read when I was forty,” he said

As he took out a tablet and a stylus

One of us said, “I can’t imagine being that old!”

 

Our teacher smiled, smoothed the day from the wax

And instructed us to attend to the Word

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”

That is what he said, not what he wrote in the wax

 

Akiva prayed, he prayed for us, and wrote

And in the wax the letters formed as fire

As gold and fire:

 

“Bereshit Bara Elohim…”

A Cure for the Common Scold - doggerel (thinking of some of the cast in the Harry Potter films)

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Cure for the Common Scold

 

For ___________________________

 

With wisdom, age, and experience a man

Comes to appreciate that most useful tool

and the entertainment value as part of the plan

In the sadly-neglected ducking stool