Dust Devils on a Sunday Morning in August - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Dust Devils on a Sunday Morning in August

 

The Road to Emmaus is asphalt now

Instead of dust devils spinning in the heat

The stench of curious chemicals flow

In shimmerings among the hovering oaks

 

Above the crisping-brown fields circling vultures

Seem focused on me – do they sense a decaying soul?

My great-grandfather drove a wagon to church

I have air-conditioning, and Chopin on the radio

 

The Road to Emmaus is asphalt now

But you still might meet a Stranger along the way

A Bronze Plaque Commemorating the Trump-Putin Summit at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Bronze Plaque Commemorating the Trump-Putin Summit

at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson

 

 

On this spot on the 15^th of August 2025

 

Nothing happened

The Shroud of Turin is True Again Today! Or Maybe Not! - doggerel having fun with the U. K. DAILY MAIL

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Shroud of Turin is True Again Today! Or Maybe Not!

 

The ghost of Amelia Earhart speaks

 

The U.K. Daily Mail examined the Shroud of Turin

And found Amelia Earhart wrapped up inside:

“Hey! This is my shroud for private buryin’!

So don’t just stand there, all goofy and bug-eyed!”

 

“You keep changing the place where you found my plane

And yesterday you said the Shroud of Turin is bogus

Today you say it’s real – you babble in vain

The ghost of me wishes you would find a focus”

 

The U.K. Daily Mail found Amelia Earhart’s plane –

Tomorrow they’ll be sure to lose it again

Our Little Universities - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Our Little Universities

 

From an idea by Nivek

 

Many books are little universities

Complete with faculties and study halls

Grassy lawns on which to argue ideas

Syllabi written from your heart and mind

 

Laboratories of the mind for distilling wisdom

A concert hall of happy voices in song

“Pomes All Sizes” spoken from the heart

And maybe a Rain Tree on your walk to class

 

The Brothers Karamazov as a prayer book

300 Tang Poems with the wisdom of China

The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Q

          (Not THAT Q!)

Doctor Zhivago in squabbling translations

 

And some have spoken most eloquently

for Goodnight Moon

And now what university of yours helps sing

the world in tune?

Let’s All Meet in Cicely - sonnet

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Let’s All Meet in Cicely

 

 

From an idea flown all the way from Thailand

 

 

Let’s all meet in Cicely before the snow

You can find me sitting outside The Brick

At peace as the gentle autumn breezes blow

Having put aside my hiking stick

 

Fleischmann joins us on that old wooden bench

Chris-in-the-Morning stops by for a beer

Hollings gives Shelly a husbandly pinch

She takes his broom and with it smacks his rear

 

Maurice and Maggie, Ruth-Anne, Marilyn, and Ed

Drop in with stories of love and life and history

And news brought in by plane and road and sled

To this Brigadoon of happy mystery

 

Let’s all meet in Cicely before the snow

And share in its peace before we go

Never Begin a Poem with “I” - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Never Begin a Poem with “I”

 

I suppose I have been commanded to write

These fragile words in attempted iambs

Which few will ever read or ever want to read

But then – you are reading them

                                                          Thank you

You've Read Your Last Free Article - not exactly a poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

You’ve Read Your Last Free Article

 

Yes, I have.

 

(Click. Delete.)

Leave It To Beaver - The Shakespearean I.C.E. Episode - pastiche and doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Disturbances in Church - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

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