Lawrence Hall, HSG
Cups and Jugs and
Kettles and Beds
St. Mark 7:1-13
Let the coffee cups rattle with denunciations
About the contextual meaning of “beds”
At the fossil table in the roadside café’
That Javneh of theological studies
For the health and comfort of our other guests
No smoking, please
Lawrence Hall, HSG
A Sanitary Pad Along
Beer Can Road
To walk abroad, and recreate yourselves
-Julius Caesar III.ii.256
A sanitary pad along Beer Can Road
Sodden and heavy with the waning night’s damp
And beer cans shining in the morning sun
Completing a picture of misadventure
I once found a ratchet wrench about here
And a knot of twist-ties further along
And a couple of disposable lighters for toking crack
I’ll just give this latest detritus a miss
But on my morning stroll I won’t pass by
Without a prayer for happiness for all
Especially my nocturnal predecessors
Lawrence Hall, HSG
A Dusty Drum Kit
In a re-sale shop in Huntington, Texas
Fronting for decaying videotapes
And clocks that will never again chime the time
Through tinny mechanical syncopation
A drum set reposes without percussion
An arpeggio of silent despair
Whose cymbals and snare impatiently wait
As do the bass and other impedimenta
For the hand of a youth who has something to howl
The next kid through the door might bell the cat:
“There it is – I will rhythm the truth with that!”
Lawrence Hall, HSG
The Latest Atmospheric River End-of-the-World
Pineapple Express Bomb Cyclone from H**l
The news is falling! The news is falling!
-as Chicken Little did not say
An apocalyptic storm of such intensity
We’re all going to drown in a flood of breaking news
The streets already overflowing with hyperbole
From reporters in damp shoes awaiting their cues
Lawrence Hall, HSG
A
Quatrain to Explain the Infinite Monkey Theory
If you set a monkey at a typewriter
To type and type for all eternity
What he will type, that little blighter
Is a politician’s speech – nonsense, you see!
Lawrence Hall, HSG
A Rotor-Tiller and the
Feast of the Presentation
Names have not been restored, as
Aslan says
Some are pleased to call this Ground-Hog Day
Although there are no ground hogs here
But the Presentation is everywhere and forever
I passed the morning deconstructing the tiller
(instead
of sacred texts)
Working debris from around the tines
Thinking about the coming spring and how -
How the Presentation is everywhere and forever
Names have not been restored, as Aslan says
Still, the Presentation is everywhere and forever
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Browsing the Poetry Titles
in the Book Store
I
soon had a thorough understanding of the rules. For a poem to go through there
had to be a few lines devoted to [
]
-Yevtushenko, p. 68, A Precocious Autobiography
Call Me by the Post-Colonial Things We Carried Without Borders
in the Boat in the Twilight Garden of our Being Unsilencing the Silent Voices Songs
of Our Powerful People Aimlessly in Fire New and Selected Hopes To Change Your
Life Forever Becoming the Healing You
Always Wanted to Be in the Emptiness Within While Searching the Soul of the
Underself in Quest of Anti-hierarchy For Elegies of the Lover
Who
Never
Was
But
Who
Might
Be on the Silences of Screaming Wings in a Rhapsody of a
Plangent Tangent of Voided Meanings at the End of the Rainbow World When a Golden Sickle
Pierced the Sighings of the Moon in Your Shivering Hand Leaves in the Exiled
Gentleness of Barbed Wire
Pillows Comforting Your Cerulean Soul-Quest of Meaningful Meaninglessness adrift in the Writhing
Arms of your Powerful Weakness as a Twinkling Pancreas
Vaults Ambition Through
Disconnected Quotes from Shakespeare Who was My Soul-Twin Aflame with Passionless
Passion for a Forbidden Vegetable Incarnadining the Cosmic Cypress of Your Unattainable
Body Through the Music of the Trapezoids as the Forbidden
Kiss of Life
And, like, stuff
