Lawrence Hall
When a Book Banner’s
Books are Banned
Bill O’Reilly approves of banning the printed word
Except when it comes to his books – “That’s absurd!”
Bill O’Reilly Is Furious As His Own Titles Get Removed After
Supporting Florida Book Bans (msn.com)
Lawrence Hall
To Accept Israel
“Israel
was not created in order to disappear - Israel will endure and flourish. It is
the child of hope and the home of the brave. It carries the shield of democracy
and it honors the sword of freedom.”
– President John F. Kennedy)
To deny Israel is to curse ourselves
For we are inheritors of the Covenant
That He should be our God, and we His people
He creates us, He calls us – this is so
He has given us prophecy and law
Cattle in the fields, fish in all the seas
And lovers, flowers, sunsets, songs, salvation
The Great Dance of Creation - and Himself
Let not the sinister whisperer divide us!
To accept Israel is to accept - everyone
Lawrence Hall, HSG
An English Major
Screaming at a Wall Clock
(A French officer would be too well-mannered to do that)
Passing from one office to another in quest
Of some elusive official signature
I saw a woman screaming at a clock
And heard her, too, because screams are like that
“She’s an English major,” someone said in explanation
“She and her boy Wordsworth are at it again
And meddlesome Coleridge keeps putting his oar in”
I nodded in understanding; Milton had mentioned it
A scholar should never scream at institutional clocks;
He should discreetly disapprove of them
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Garage-Sale Rolodex®
for Seventy-Five Cents
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed,
debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
-Patrick McGoohan as Number Six in The
Prisoner
The Rolodex was once a symbol of power
Of knowledge marshalled into sequences
Orderly sequences alphabetized by names
By names and cross indices of subjects and dates
Of enemies or allies or contacts, rarely friends
Condensed in ink on smoothly finished cards
Restrained in place by colored plastic tabs
Awaiting the stroke of an office tyrant’s hand
The Rolodex was subsumed within The ‘Phone
Lawrence Hall
Upon the Return of
Artifacts to Wounded Knee
“We hope the spirits are on their way now.”
-Richard Broken Nose
A knife, a needle, an arrow, a pair of shoes
Some beads, a shirt, a drum, a tobacco pouch
A little girl’s doll, fragments of a pot
And tools for completing one’s daily chores
They are not artifacts; they are not displays
They are the ordinary necessities of life
Stolen from the dead hands of innocents
To be numbered, indexed, filed, boxed, and mocked
These things are sacred now, part of the Great Dance of Creation
We pray the spirits will come and take them home
As plundered items return to Wounded Knee, decisions await
(artdaily.com)
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Endsville
All in all, at the end of the day, and in conclusion, when
the curvy lady sings, when the truth be told, when all is said and done, when
the chickens come home to roost, when all the evidence is in, in sum, in short,
in brief, the bottom line is, we can only conclude, to conclude, in the end, so
as I said before, to sum up, and as Churchill / Gandhi / Harry Potter / a wise
man once said, therefore, all things considered, most importantly, taking the
facts into account, to wrap things up, on the whole, and most importantly, and
finally…
(I was going somewhere with this…)
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Polysyllabic Aspirational
Bourgeois Vanity
(and, like, stuff)
Surrealism
A melting clock is not aesthetically pleasing
Nor is it of any utility
It celebrates chaos instead of life
And bullies us with a manifesto
Surrealism
Gives pale aesthetes topics for their idle hours
Surrendering imagination to cliches’
The endlessly self-referential I, I, me, me
(Another double-latte, if you please)
Surrealism
The republican’s derivative art is but
The emperor’s new clothes turned inside out
(And have you seen my serial
takes on Greek ikons re-imagined and re-envisioned as diatomic forms through
vegan egg-tempera on recycled barn wood as a repudiation of hidebound colonialist
oppressivist occupationist Orthodoxy by sequencing monks on Mount Athos as agnostic
Jewish fast-food workers influenced by the works of Dali and the Rapallo poets through
a motif of running wedges in asymmetric lines from a cosmopolitan image of
Heaven to a day-glow Wal-Mart beside a sea of transcendental bubbles which
symbolize my feelings when my latest grant was canceled? Hmmmmmmm? Of course
the straights don’t get it; their lack of imagination is why they stopped The
People’s funding I deserve so that I can make great art chiding them for being dullard
capitalist mechanicals. I do take all major credit cards for my works.)
