The Disinterment of Pablo Neruda - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Disinterment of Neruda

 

Qui sine peccato est vestrum, primus in aliam lapidem mittat

 

This Neruda - the Fascists murdered him

This Neruda - let us murder him again

The people read and love his poems too much

And they ignore ours – let us dig him up

 

This Neruda – we will dig him up

And subject him to our Inquisition

We now will tell you what each fragment means

Each fragment of each word, his flesh, his bone

 

We have our bullhorns and our three-beat chants

His poems will mean what we tell you they mean

 

Shut up

Poetry and Jazz Stroll into a Smoky Bar

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Poetry and Jazz Stroll into a Smoky Bar

 

Poetry, like jazz, is itself

If you feel a need to explain it

You’ve failed

                      Art sings itself

Wipe That Geographical Expression Off Your Face - quatrain

 Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

 

Wipe That Geographical Expression Off Your Face

 

Alas, poor country! / Almost afraid to know itself

 

-Macbeth IV.iii.164-165

 

We are now a geographical expression

An almost amorphous land mass occupied

By violent tribes of shifting loyalties

And assemblies of squabbling Merovingians

A Burning Car in Baghdad - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Burning Car in Baghdad

 

 

The delusion that by force you can impose the Millennium on the human race is one of the most dangerous delusions in existence.

― Agatha Christie, They Came to Baghdad

 

 

In the center of Baghdad a burning car

Illuminates long centuries of pain

Inflicted by schemes of improvement upon

A city of scholarship, wisdom, and art

 

Militias, commanders, air-strikes, and bombs

So clever that they can single out one car

Without harming another car at the traffic light -

And somehow this will make the world all better

 

Dullard journalists will type “tit-for-tat”

Because they don’t know anything else to say

 

And neither do I

Cups and Jugs and Kettles and Beds - something more than a Quatrain

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

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

A Sanitary Pad Along Beer Can Road - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

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

 

A Dusty Drum Kit - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

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!”