Lawrence Hall
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Dispatches for the Colonial Office


                                Point-and-Won’t-Shoot Camera

The concept of the point-and-shoot camera obtains
But a Me-‘Phone camera doesn’t see it that way
I stopped to watch a bug-grazing bird
Who approached me as if she wanted to visit

I took out my Me-‘Phone for a photograph
And it didn’t recognize my handsome face
And I had to tap a four-digit code
And the bird grew suspicious and flew away

O Egret, in your beautiful brown and white -
I truly understand your need for flight

Lawrence Hall
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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

Lawrence Hall
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Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                          “Just One More Thing”

His shabby raincoat
His rumply old suit and tie
His “Just one more thing…”

Lawrence Hall
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Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                      Soldiers Dicing for Jesus’ Garments

1st Soldier: “Let’s roll the dice for Jesus’ coat and hat.”
2nd Soldier: “We don’t need dice; there’s an app for that.”

Lawrence Hall
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Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                           High-Pressure Dome in a Coffee Cup

Blue light - an illusion of comfort at dawn
The streaky windows frame a winter day
Illusions and delusions lying to us
For this is July, when hopes wither and die

The sun’s tentacles ripple across the fields
One of them slithers to your window and leers
Mocking the fantasies of your air-conditioned sleep
Beckoning you outside: come and be fried

The sun’s hot streakings, mortals seeking, they roam
As summer’s slithering death: a high-pressure dome

Lawrence Hall
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Dispatches for the Colonial Office

         A Three-Character-Group Code for Advancing Civilization


                                   Learn. To. Dostoyevsky.

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                       The Apex Predator


                    They…
                    Have watched me rise from the darkness of war
                    Dripping with my enemies’ blood

                            -Beowulf, trans. Raffel, lines 151-153


The apex predator feeds upon the flesh
Of those who wanted desperately to live
To hew and chew and gnaw and digest and mesh
With those who died with no desire to forgive

The apex predator feeds while others starve
The sentient flee from him in grievous fear
But he always wins, his victims then to carve
In ****** fields and haunted forests drear

War ends violently in drang und sturm
And the apex predator is obviously
                                                  ­ The Worm