"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 coulda / woulda / shoulda made you famous!

High-Pressure Dome in a Coffee Cup - poem about summer heat

 

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