Saturday, August 9, 2025

Stopping by Literary Interpretations on a Snowy Evening - shallow rhyming doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Stopping by Literary Interpretations on a Snowy Evening

 

From an idea by a friend in Thailand

 

Whose Deconstructionist Narrative this is I think I know

Their (because we mustn’t say “her” or “his”)

New Criticism is on their podcast, though

They will not see me applying Phenomenology here

To help fill up their woods with Neo-Post-Colonialist blow

 

My little solar car must think it other-gendered

To pause while I Conceptualize without a Starbuck’s near

Between Foucault and Derrida here

Next to the Sapir-Whorf Theory, and without a beer

 

They give their location transponder a Derrida shake

To demand a formal apology for this cultural mistake

The only other sound’s the Existential creep

Of Masonic Catholic Nazi Zionism on the take

 

Judgmental stereotypes are flying, shallow and cheap

But I have an Inner Reality to keep

And an Intertextual Analysis of Post-Structuralism to steep

And an Aesthetic Objectification of Dialectics to steep

Friday, August 8, 2025

As You Sometimes Remind Me - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

As You Sometimes Remind Me…

 

 

One day I'll suddenly recall:
The sun exists!

 

-Pasternak, “About These Poems”1

 

 

When the world focuses on a sheet of paper

In a little room where hopes have come to die

The pen can’t write out a prescription for life

Or limn the remedies for a fallen world

 

We begin our days as did Pasternak

A cup of tea against the fear, the fear

Unsure of the conflicting daily edicts

The babblings about ballrooms, tariffs, and arrests

 

Pasternak opened a window to light and fair

 

And to the children playing in the snow he cried,

“My dears, what century is it outside?”

 

 

1Translations vary

Thursday, July 31, 2025

I Am Spartacus! (Okay, Maybe Not) - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

I Am Spartacus! (Okay, Maybe Not)

 

I am not Spartacus!

I don’t wanna die!

No, really, let’s discuss

The death of some other guy!

A Variation on the Privacy Tour - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Variation on the Privacy Tour

 

We Ask Everyone to Respect Our Family’s Privacy

Except for the Go Fund Me everyone will see

And the reception at the Something Hall, date and time

And the Go Fund Me everyone will see

 

And the visitation, date and time

And the Go Fund Me everyone will see

And the services at Our Lady of Something, date and time

And the Go Fund Me everyone will see

 

And the interment at Something Cemetery, date and time

And the Go Fund Me everyone will see

And the scholarship fundraiser

And the Go Fund Me everyone will see

The Strange Adventure of Tarzan, the Epsteinian Files, and The Burn-Bags of Opar - perfectly awful doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Strange Adventure of Tarzan, the Epsteinian Files,

and The Burn-Bags of Opar

 

I am not at liberty to lay before the inquiring minds of an objective public the manner in which the curious document and chilling testimony below came into my possession except that this was through the offices of a mysterious midnight visitor on business from Porlock with a wooden leg and an ivory eye of curious and antique design – or was that an ivory leg and a wooden eye? – and I must assure the reader that it was the visitor from Porlock who made do with a tapping ivory eye and a sightless wooden leg or sightless eye and tapping artificial leg, not the pleasant village of Porlock, because English villages are possessed of streets and lanes, not eyes and legs, on a stormy night at the time of the equinoctial gales when ships put to sea knowing that they (the crews, not the ships) must place their lives into the hands of our merciful and loving God who knoweth all things and disposeth all things and so now pray take a seat and light your pipe while I set my spectacles aright and read to you this strange narrative entrusted to my discretion and, like, stuff:

 

The Strange Adventure of Tarzan, The Epsteinian Files,

 and The Burn-Bags of Opar

 

In search of The Lost Epsteinian Files

Tarzan slipped into a city ruinous and far

And in a secret tunnel that ran for miles

Stumbled onto The Burn-Bags of Opar

 

Queen Kristi of Opar, long in love with Tarzan

Sacrificed to her gods a dog and a goat

Then in an armored golf cart chased him as far as she can

          (Okay, then, you try to rhyme “Tarzan”)

To the edge of the Alligator Alcatraz moat

 

Tarzan, exhausted, thought he was a doomer

Kristi was sharpening her sacrificial knife

          (or loading her thirty-thirty; the records are unclear)

But she was death-whispered by Laura Loomer

Thus saving the burn-bags and our hero’s life

 

And The Epsteinian Files?  The mystery no longer abodes -

The scripts for Gilligan’s Island, the lost episodes

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

"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…”

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

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

Darwinianism Stalks the Suburbs - poem

  Lawrence Hall Mhall46184@aol.com Dispatches for the Colonial Office   Darwinianism Stalks the Suburbs   God giveth the earth t...