Negative Capability and Stuff - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Negative Capability and Stuff

 

For Nat Lipstadt

 

Exactly inexactly that sheet of paper

A blank sheet of paper rich in its blankness

Because there is nothing there and so

The possibilities of being are without limits

 

Except for that 8.5 x 11” thing

Which the writer is free to repudiate

And see beyond it a spectrum of beauty and truth

Which is not there except in seeing it so

 

Letting go too can make imaginings new

(But still, my very dear friends, the rent is due!)

Poets Speak of Hay - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Poets Speak of Hay

 

For Nat Lipstadt, Ken Pepiton, VerseBuster, and Billy Collins

 

I was raised on a farm

Which did me no harm

But bales of hay

And stacks of hay

Pitching hay

Filling the old pickup with hay

And a trailer of hay

Hay and hay and more hay

In the heat of each midsummer day

Day after day after day

(You may channel Coleridge's Ancient Mariner here)

The old barn full of hay Hot, musty, fusty, allergenic hay

Day after musty, fusty, allergenic day

Hot day, hot, hot, hot every da®ned day

You may

Have my hay

As Dimitri Karamazov did not say

 "A ticket for hay? I herewith return my ticket!"

Poetry is an Uncommon God - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Poetry is an Uncommon Good

 

Thanks to Nat and Friends

 

Poetry is a common good

Like dreams and water and earth and air

What graces might bless us if we would

Be grateful for each as an answered prayer

The Voices are Talking about Nat - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Voices are Talking about Nat

The Voices slither about like Lady Macbeth

Claiming arcane knowledge of life and death

Hissing subtly with their smoky breath

Their business manager is a dude named Seth

 

(Seth attends art school at night and says his instructors don’t understand his depth of existential being-ness and, like, stuff.)

 

They (The Voices, not Seth) visit me nightly when I’m asleep

Approaching me in crouch and crawl and creep

Desiring to drag my soul down into the deep

Piling my vanities onto a vermiculous heap

 

(The Voices took my evening class at Cinder Block Community College and slouched sullenly in the back wearing their Grateful Dead baseball caps on the few occasions they bothered to show up. They filed a complaint against me for dropping them.)

 

They usually lurk in my right parietal

So, shhhhh! - they’re rather anti-societal

 

(They’re all The Office fans and are looking for affordable housing in Scranton if you know someone with a deal.)