Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
You’ve Read Your Last
Free Article
Yes, I have.
(Click. Delete.)
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
You've Read Your Last Free Article - not exactly a poem
Monday, August 11, 2025
Leave It To Beaver - The Shakespearean I.C.E. Episode - pastiche and doggerel
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Leave it to Beaver – The Shakespearean I.C.E. Episode
Dramatis Personae:
Ward, a husband and father
Wally, Ward’s teenaged son
June, Ward’s wife, accomplishing hussefery in a dress and pearls
Beaver, Ward and June’s younger son
Ward:
Wally, I knowest thou hath merry plans for the morrow
But I must tell thee, to thy woe and sorrow
That thou’rt to stay home, and mow the lawn
Wally:
Oh, golly, gee, seest thou my face turn wan?
Beloved father, I cannot with thy orders comport
For I cannot find my comradely passport
Nor, in addition to that paperwork dearth,
Yea, verily, my certificate of birth!
Without which workers are subject to arrest
By I.C.E., as the news and warnings attest
June:
‘Tis true – I.C.E. feareth every gangbanger and yob
But they will imprison some kid at his job
And Superman might get thee; I.C.E. hired him today
That is his new truth, justice, and th’American way
Beaver:
Gee, Wally, if thou’rt carried to Alcatraz
Can I have thy room?
Voice Off:
We needeth no stinkin’ warrants!
Exeunt omnes, pursued by Dogberries with guns
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Disturbances in Church - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Disturbances in Church
The more I am
disturbed by liturgical novelties
The less I am
disturbed by God
The less I am
disturbed by liturgical novelties
The more I am
disturbed by God
All of which
is logical, not odd
Saturday, August 9, 2025
Stopping by Literary Interpretations on a Snowy Evening - shallow rhyming doggerel
Lawrence Hall
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
Friday, August 8, 2025
As You Sometimes Remind Me - poem
Lawrence Hall
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
Thursday, July 31, 2025
I Am Spartacus! (Okay, Maybe Not) - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
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
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
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
Wednesday, July 30, 2025
"Just One More Thing" - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
“Just One More Thing”
His shabby raincoat
His rumply old suit and tie
His “Just one more thing…”
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
Minefield and Altar - poem
Lawrence Hall
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
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
Monday, July 28, 2025
High-Pressure Dome in a Coffee Cup - poem
Lawrence Hall
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
Sunday, July 27, 2025
A Three-Character-Group Code for Advancing Civilization
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
A Three-Character-Group Code for Advancing
Civilization
Learn. To. Dostoyevsky.
Saturday, July 26, 2025
They. Learned. To. Code. - poem
Lawrence Hall
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
Friday, July 25, 2025
The Apex Predator - poem
Lawrence Hall
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
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
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
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
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
A 5-7-5 About Listening to Your Body - yes, a 5-7-5 unworthy of a senryu
Lawrence Hall
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
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!
Monday, July 21, 2025
Loose Vowels - not really a poem
Lawrence Hall
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
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
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