Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Ennui at the Gas Pumps
You Have Been Approved
Please Remove Card Now
Select Product
Remove Nozzle
Begin Fueling
Did you bring the fuel ticket?
This number is unclear; why is that?
The boss wants to see you.
Welcome to Another 16-Hour Day
Yep
Yep
Yep
(Sigh)
Give a Man a Fish or a Bucket Truck
Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day
Give a man a bucket truck and he’ll
Block
Every blind corner
Every rural road
Every lane
Every driveway
Every intersection
Every pasture access
Every field gate
In the county
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
The Manifest Destiny of
Cooking Shows
There are no national crises so desperate
Or times so burdened by uncertainty, despair, and fear
That the American people will not rouse themselves
To applaud some guy on TV cooking an omelet
And let the people cry, “WHOOO! WHOOO!”
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Turning Over Parts of Poems with a Golden Shovel
A golden shovel poem well, okay, maybe
Or maybe it’s like digging up a friend
Rearranging his bits rearranging his bones
And exclaiming I have built a new body!
Maybe
A pile of bones there a pile of bones here
Another pile of bones a golden shovel
Ars per ars gizzards and gristle
The gravedigger wants his shovel back
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Her Delicate Wit and Charm
Her conversation and
her charming intellect
Delight not like champagne
in tingling sips
Bringing forth
knowledge, subtle and circumspect –
But rather like Lady Macbeth exercising her whips
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Going
to Concrete Floor Space Hungry
Our masters couched
in swollen luxury
Are flown in
government craft to their private pleasures
While American
workers wait in soup line misery
Or sleep on floors because
the planes never come
We are the abandoned
over whom they fly
Sending acronyms to
beat us and demand our papers
Those uberklasse
gauleiters of the sky -
More champagne,
please! Such Great Gatsby capers!
Some call them
morons, but they’re as smart as can be
It’s just that they
don’t give a (bitcoin) for the likes of you and me
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
A Proposed Coda to the Rite of Baptism
Priest, parents, and godparents say to the child after the blessing:
“This is your life, kid – it might sting a little.”
