Lawrence Hall, HSG
[email protected]

              The Power was Out, the Road was barely Passable,
                                   a Man Wore a Glock

The dawn was hot and wet and sticky and still
In quest of a coffee and a croissant
I stowed a chainsaw into the four-wheel-drive
And dawdled into town, clearing windfall from the road

The breakfast buffet at the Valero, and then out
Some men blocked the door, swapping pills and cash
I begged their pardon and walk through their deal
One wore a Glock on his hip; they all glowered at me

The dawn was hot; the paper-cup coffee was warm
I drove home and got my old generator to work

Nothing is more pragmatic than a votive light
A candlelight
A little light
A prayer light

Lawrence Hall
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https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com


                            The Presentation of the Rodent

          “The Feast of Candlemas…is perhaps the most
            ancient festival of Our Lady.”

                                    -Missale Romanum

The Catholic funeral home calendar
Prints “GROUNDHOG DAY (USA)” in generous type
“The Presentation of the Lord,” well, not so much
And “                                      ” 1 not at all

Perhaps one day we faithful will look out
From our dark-tunneled burrows of lost time
And gaze upon the morning shadows to ask
If there will be 2,000 more years of civilization

Because in the Temple

Our Lady presents unto our Lord the Child
But we present unto ourselves - a rat



1 The Purification of Our Lady

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                         The President Gets Tough on Firearms


       “I announced dozens of executive actions to keep guns out of
         dangerous hands…”

          Statement from President Joe Biden Marking Twelve Years
          Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting | The
          White House


The President wants to expand and widen
Gun laws for all that will be applied in
Each state in this nation that we abide in
No exceptions at all; every citizen's tied in

(Except, of course, for Hunter Biden)

Lawrence Hall, HSG
[email protected]

               The President of Columbia University is Saddened

                   “Why must we fight for the right to live,
                     over and over, each time the sun rises?”

                                        ― Leon Uris, Exodus

Jews are not welcome in the cool universities
The laboratories are shut against them
Libraries, classrooms, meetings, coffee shops
Here, sir, the bullhorn rules (Hey! Hey! **! **!)

Administrators smile weakly and shrug:
We cannot guarantee your safety here
The Merovingian president says she is saddened
That Jewish students are harassed and beaten

The halls of academia are lined with swastikas
And 7 October is remembered with glee

Lawrence Hall
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https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

          The President of the United States Addresses the World
                                             24 February 2022

Let me be perfectly clear the bottom line
Is this flagrant violations unilaterally
Create make no mistake stained by association
People’s hearts and hopes with every tool more purposeful

Vision assault on the very principles
Every tool at our disposal rising prices
At the gas pump American gas and oil
Companies my administration sanctions

Package monitoring energy supplies consuming
Countries actively working feeling coordinating
At the gas pump stand up to bullies we
are prepared to respond additional moves

Sanctioned to amplify the joint impact...

                   While the brave young are shot down in the streets

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                      The President’s Complaint


            “Speak, vermin!...What is the meaning of all this waste,
             this gluttony, this self-indulgence?”

      -The White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe


Juneteenth celebrates freedom from *******
But the president would have us all in Don-dage

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                       A Laser Focus on Screaming Deaths

               Look upon my Works, ye Mighty, and despair

                               -Shelley, “Ozymandias”

Laser focus laser focus laser
Focus laser focus laser focus
Laser focus teens falling to their deaths
Laser focus escape for two thousand dollars

Laser focus or a promissory note
If the enemy overrun the airport
We’ll laser focus your refund back to you
With this laser focus degree of precision  

Shredded body in the laser focus
Of the wheel well

The president wants us to come together –
One imagines a sea-to-shining sea
Patriotic ****** (with a touch of leather?)
And everyone moaning “MAGA!!!!” simultaneously

The President is writing in ALL CAPS today
And that’s all right because caps are okay:
They keep his head warm in the winter’s cold
He has ‘em in colors: red, white, and gold

And an old one in green from Viet-Nam
Where he was a-serving 1 of his Uncle Sam
Only he didn’t, but that doesn’t matter
He’ll dodge the issue with bluster and natter

Be grateful he sports his red MAGA cap
To cover his head, ‘cause it’s full of
                                                      

        ­                                                                h­air




1 allusion to Kipling's "Gunga Din"

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                         The Prince-Poet-Cat of Gatineau, Quebec

                                For Pushkin, of Happy Memory
                        And His House Pets Abbie and Alexander

In an ice-cream summer in the long ago
I met a marvelous cat in Gatineau

Pushkin by name, a fastidious Russian
His shiny fur coat never needed brushin’

He purred in an elegant iambic tetrameter
Precisely in its orderly parameter

A cat, of course, needn’t meter his speech
For a cat is a poem whose motions teach:

Running
Leaping
Sleeping
Purring
pouncing
Growling
Yowlin­g
Howling
Twitching
Lurking
Sneaking
Posing
Dreaming
Snuggling

W­hile in all things giving his children delight

In an ice-cream summer in the long ago
I met a marvelous cat in Gatineau

Lawrence Hall, HSG
[email protected]

                         The Principal Who Liked His Pizza

If test scores made HIM look good – pizza for all
And a hallway plaque with HIS NAME at the top
If HE could claim an academic win – pizza for all
And another plaque with HIS NAME at the top

If the drama team won a competition – pizza for all
And another plaque – HE was HIS favorite topping
If the football team won district – pizza for all
And a bigger plaque with HIS NAME at the top

And when the evening sun set over the gym
Five or six of those pizzas went home with HIM

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                              The Problems with Self-Publishing

The problems with self-publishing are self-publishers:
“Everyone just loves my book; tell me what you think
It’s about my cousin who was a Navy SEAL
And then became a millionaire and then a priest

“He saved the nation from nuclear warfare
In a mission so classified that we can’t talk about it
(But he told me all about it, of course)
And then he saved souls and counseled with popes

“My book is inspired by the Holy Spirit
So read it tonight and tell me what you think”

When the kitchen staff did the washing-up
They could not but notice, among the bowls
And serviettes, spoons, knives, pitchers, and plates,
One of the best silver trays, blotchy with blood

And scraps of vertebrae, ruining the shine
“Oh, bother; these stains will never come out,”
Muttered the old woman in charge of such things
But she scrubbed and polished, did a good job

With that and with each costly silver cup
When the kitchen staff did the washing-up

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                   The Pulitzer People Did Not Telephone Today

                                  Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 25

The Pulitzer people did not telephone today
Nor did the Library of Congress or the folks at Nobel
I could paper a room with rejection slips
Except that rejections are electronic now

I have no honorary doctorate
Universities do not ask me to speak
Publishers knock at other scribblers’ doors
And my poor verses share leaves with Orlando’s

Which is not as I like it –
                    but there is you
And it is in you that true honors accrue

"The Queen Stands..."

                                               -Psalm 45

The Queen stands at His right hand, arrayed in gold
The Queen is not ornamented in gold
The Queen is not decorated in gold
The Queen is not merely costumed in gold

The Queen is royally arrayed in gold
For She alone is the Theotokos
In Whose honor the sun is given to shine
Through Her, the Passage between worlds

The Light of the world is the Saviour indeed:
The Queen stands at His right hand, arrayed in gold

Cf:
Psalm 45
St. Gregory Palamas, Homily 38

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                       The Rabbit Held Very, Very Still

                             Dedicated to Elmer Fudd

The rabbit held still
The rabbit held very still
Caught raiding my garden

(No rabbits were harmed in the making of these scribbles. I distracted Luna-Dog and Astrid-the-Wonder-Dachshund to another part of the yard.)

I could not coax this site into publishing "There are no Foreign Accents in Texas," but this short poem is available at:

https://dispatchesforthecolonialoffice.blogspot.com/?zx=791c4035bc496f75

Later:

A weak version for HP:

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                              There are no Foreign Accents in Texas

                       “For all its enormous range of space, climate, and
                         physical appearance, and for all the internal
                         squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a
                         tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other
                         section of America.”

                                                   – John Steinbeck

There are no foreign accents here, right?
A foreign accent is for a foreigner
And there are no foreigners here
The land belongs to all of us and to no one

Before even the First Nations there was the land
And we humans have come in successive waves
Betraying each other with conquest and blood
Violence and betrayal instead of feasting

But we are trying to make it better now -
There are no foreign accents here, right?

There are only two dreams: freedom and love
And if you wake exiled from Eden again
From a moment of exquisite happiness  
Your dream was wonderfully, happily true

There are only two dreams: freedom and love
Any other topic is not a dream
But only the clamorings of others
Demanding always a piece of your soul

There are only two dreams: freedom and love -
Tears mean only that you must wait awhile

Lawrence Hall
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Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                      There is More Than One Book

A civilization writes and reads its books
As poetry, pictures, prose, and glorious song
Of war and work and love and peaceful fields
Scholarship and courage and a people’s arts

But when unhappy men with an unhappy god
Maintain that their one book is all we’ll need
In submission to build an empire of death
The threat is clear: their god doesn’t want us

Reading and writing are civilization
From the very beginning of Creation

Lawrence Hall
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https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                             There is no Symbolism in a Flat Tire

There is no symbolism in a flat tire
This morning it was round, and now it is not
Part of it is round, and part of it is flat
Either way, it’s not going anywhere

Not to the movies, or for coffee with a friend
Or to the grocery for that famous loaf of bread
Which through mitosis becomes shopping for a week
And I didn’t know you like asparagus

A tire cannot fly us to the moon with Sinatra
It never could. But Denny’s with you would do

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                   There’s Nothing Old to Write About the Moon

The newest moon – it blessed us tonight
A sharp bright crescent within a rim-glowing orb
Following the sun’s afterglow deep into the west
Ornamented with a frosting of stars

Lawrence Hall
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https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                   “The Result was Silence”

          "Today I initiated a telephone conversation with the President
          of the Russian Federation. The result was silence.”

                               -President Volodymyr Zelenskiy

There is no silence in Kiev this dawn
Morning commutes, intermittent news feeds
Explosions. Power failures. How many will die
Without finishing their WORDLE today

Old men rattle their dentures in outrage
Sky News reports a couple of police officers
In the street below, smoking cigarettes
Which makes more sense than most things just now

Kharkov’s air-raid sirens are deeper than Kiev’s
There is no silence in Kiev this dawn

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                       The Retiring of Old Snow

Clinging to blue shadows and shades and trees
Stained ice and sleet and snow from days ago
Silently steams away as vapour, as mist
Beneath today’s yellow and slanting sun

On Monday eve the skies were low and grey
And Tuesday morn soft flakes began to float
And then the rattle of indelicate sleet
Sent every creature to its appointed burrow

And now the little that’s left hides from the breeze
Clinging to blue shadows and shades and trees

Little men arguing in shabby rooms
Meetings, manifestos, revolvers, bombs
Informers, spies, social organization
Speeches, minutes, dues, What is to be Done?
The great cause of the Proletariat
Greetings from our good comrades in Smolensk
Nihilism, committees, secrecy
The thirst for culture is aristocratic
Nihilism is the only art of the people
Rumors, whispers, clandestine magazines
The unification of workers and peasants
Resolutions passed in the factory soviet
Clenched fists to reject the personal life
Electrification and equality
Cigarettes, *****, the people’s justice
Against the parasitical bourgeoisie
Solidarity to destroy the kulaks
His poetry reeks of sentimentality
Self-centered intellectual decadence
The people’s will for the people’s party
Education for the twentieth century
Lift high the red banner,
                                                fill full the graves

The Revolution is a Corpse

The revolution is a stinking corpse
And spreading béarnaise sauce all over a corpse
While chanting “It’s alive!” doesn’t make it so
Because a revolution can never live

Artists are never revolutionaries
Because artists work up the good and true
From the foundation of creation
While revolutionaries obey diktats

Rearranging a corpse is never art
And revolution is always a corpse

The revolution is a stinking corpse
And spreading Walter Duranty all over a corpse
While chanting “It’s alive!” won’t make it so
Because a revolution is only death

Artists are never revolutionaries
Because artists work up the good and true
From the foundation of Creation
While revolutionaries obey diktats

Rearranging a corpse is never art
And revolution is always a corpse

Why? How?

Please consider the seeming illogic
The seeming illogic of paying a man
A good and wise and educated man
To poke his finger upwards in your ///

After a visit to a wizard’s lab
Where a pleasant, professional young woman
Attaches a vampire butterfly to your wrist
And ***** your blood into a little phial

“Now you might feel a little pressure, okay?”
And then consider the happy logic
                                                           ­        of staying alive

The Richest Country in the World

A concrete sidewalk for skipping to school:
A busy flower shop, the picture show
Post office, the hole-in-the-wall café
The general mercantile, the old feed store

The school is gone; the sidewalk hasn’t changed
Except that no one walks it any more -
Just archaeology, weeds and bricks that tell
Of once-upon-a-time along Main Street

No townsfolk now, only unroofed walls and sky
Not far from where the four-lane passes by

A wanderer came upon the mysterious sphynx
“Stranger, stand still, if you would choose to live;
I ask each passerby what he knows and thinks,
Thus now I ask a riddle, so stand and give.”

The wanderer answered her rightly that day

And then

The treacherous sphynx devoured him anyway

Lawrence Hall
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https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                  The­ Road, The Tao, The Way

                               “The road goes ever on and on”

                                                  -Tolkien

­There is of course the Road, the Tao, the Way
And traveling it grows difficult with age
Or maybe now it travels more for us
But still the Road, the Tao, the Way leads on

When I was young over my shoulder I slung
A canvas bag with a toothbrush and a book
A pen, some poems, and dreams that wrote themselves
And I smoked my pipe and sang as I marched

Some have walked with me, and I with others
Most of them have walked ahead, and are gone
I think they are waiting for me among those stars
Who lighten and brighten as the sun sails away

At dusk Yeats and I talked about the Road
He said he thought there might be a poem

The Road to Magdalena, New Mexico

The wind is cold, a Colorado cold,
Blowing the summer back to Mexico
From whence it came; it sat upon this land
For dreary months of heavy, lifeless heat.
But now the desert dawn is blue; the stars
Make one last show before withdrawing to
The Caves of Night beyond the timberline,
Where no man walks, for fear of ancient gods.

This desert dawn is blue with promises;
The road to Magdalena creeps beneath
The ridges where the Watchers of the night
Seem now content to still their thunderstorms,
And grant a grateful pilgrim sunlit hours.
There will be coffee in Magdalena,
And not much else.  The cattle drives have ceased,
And the railroad is gone; the school is closed,
As are the saloons, but there should be coffee.

(ripped from the sages' pages of the Middle Ages – “Sumer is icumen in”)

Merrily he eats the worms
Pull them from the ground!
Their heads pop up
On them he sups
As they squirm around
Chirp, robin!

The squirrels are eating all the seeds
The cardinal’s head’s a-bobbin’
The doves are cooing
The cows are mooing
Chirp merrily, robin!

Robin, robin
How well you chirp
Now eat the worms and burp!

Burp, burp, burp!

Hello, you have reached your longtime downhome hometown Saint Swithin’s Family Medical Clinic now an outreach ministry of Consolidated #Jesus Industries Inc. where nobody knows you anymore and wouldn’t care if they did your health care is very important to us you are a valued customer our office hours are from 8 to 12 and 2 to 5 on alternate Mondays and 9-12 and 2 to 5 on Tuesdays and Thursday after Woodchuck Endangerment Awareness Day but before Greenpeace Day except when the latter falls on a Wednesday in which case our office hours are 2 to 5 only and on Saturday 8 to 12 if this is an outside pharmacy please dial X and follow the menu if this is a prescription refill please dial Y and follow the menu if this is to schedule an appointment please dial Z and remain on the line if this to reschedule an appointment dial A cubed and speak slowly when prompted to do so I’m sorry I didn’t quite get that would you like to try again I’m sorry I still didn’t get that if you would like to speak to an operator dial oh, I am sorry your time is expired please hang up and redial if you would like to speak with Dr. Name’s secretary please dial 3 if you would like to speak with Dr. Other Name’s secretary please dial 4 if you would like to talk with Nurse Practitioner Yet Another Name’s secretary please dial 5 if this is an emergency then please hang up and dial 911…

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

              The Rural Electric Co-Op’s Giant Christmas Tree

Christmas trees are a delight to a child
On the farm, situational poverty
In muck and filth, old coat against the cold
Finishing the milking long hours after dark

But to the east a Christmas tree, a hope
The electric co-op’s radio mast
Its guy wires strung with multi-colored lights
The North Pole must be something like that

Christmas trees are a delight to a child
And even more when the child becomes a man

The Russian soldier, Moskina1 in hand,
Though filthy, tired, unknown, unpaid, unfed,
Fights for his God, his Czar, and his Fatherland:
No medals, no *****, no sleep, no bread

His clumsy lowest-bidder boots,2 they rot
Into the foulness where the world’s sins pitch
Into the slime of old Iscariot3
Good men to die in some Gehenna-ditch

Saint George, Saint Michael, and Saint Seraphim
Preserve him in the end from Judas’ crime4
Life’s-end tears, life’s-end prayers, a blood-choked scream
And so he climbs the trench wall one last time,

Three cartridges5 clenched in his frozen fist,
He disappears at last into the mist6


1. Mosin-Nagant rifle
2. Betrayal by contractors
3. Betrayal by politicians and Bolsheviks
4. The Russian soldier does not fail in his his duty
5. Ammunition shortage  / God, Czar, and Fatherland
6. The Russian soldier is known to God

Lawrence Hall
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https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                      The Russia Project

I will give up my copy of The Brothers Karamazov
When they pry it from my cold, dead hands

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.c­om
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com

                  ­               The Saturday Morning Tee-Ball Hero

                                      This one’s for you, tee-ball dads!

A little moppet scampers around the tee
Waving her plastic bat as a warrior’s sword
Or as a fairy-wand to magic the day
Her first-ever tee-ball lesson with Dad

He places the ball upon the tee; she swings –
“Now wait until Daddy takes his hand away…”
WHACK!
He didn’t know the bat was all that hard!

He rubs his hand and adjusts his cap; she laughs –
At her daddy the Saturday tee-ball hero

The Saunter of the Penguins

Across our lives the Penguins saunter along:
The Odyssey, The Ministry of Fear
Parade’s End, Penrod, To a God Unknown
Ragged with study, stained with tea and beer

Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Whitman’s Leaves
Tennyson, Wordsworth, The Alexiad
Monsignor Quixote, Wooster and Jeeves
And Yevtushenko – he was quite the lad!

Dog-eared and all crinkly, Scotch-taped with age -
Each Penguin is a wise, eternal sage

In stately conclave met 1, each in his chair
The board of school trustees arrange their notes
And after an approved, appropriate prayer
They nod in their wisdom, then “aye” their votes

Entrusted with the dear, sweet children’s learning
With attendance down and the taxes up
The trustees feel a deep and mystical yearning
To make your child p*ss in a plastic cup

History, literature – what need of these?
(Make sure the valedictorian pees)

1 Chesterton

Lawrence Hall
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https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                   The School Superintendent Gives a Speech

You can’t just throw money at the problems
you have to think outside the box education
for the 21st century my door is always open
words have meanings professional passionate
mission statement child-centered striving exceptional
make a difference you can’t just throw money
at the problems you have to think outside
the box education for the 21st century
my door is always open words have meanings
professional passionate mission statement
child-centered striving exceptional make a difference
you can’t just throw money at the problems
you have to think outside the box education
for the 21st century my door is always open
words have meanings professional passionate
mission statement child-centered striving exceptional
make a difference you can’t just throw money
at the problems you have to think outside
the box education for the 21st century
my door is always open words have meanings
professional passionate mission statement
child-centered striving exceptional make a difference

In the back of a county pickup truck
Odd jobs in lifting this and shifting that
And clearing the other – work gloves, chain saws
A rake, some shovels, water in the cooler

He wipes hot sweat with his zebra-stripe shirt:
“Better than the cells, Mr. H, much better
Sun and fresh air; it ain’t so bad, you know
A little hard work never hurt nobody

It was that old devil dope; I couldn’t say no…”

“Enough of that now, boys; we got to go.”

Lawrence Hall, HSG
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                            These are not the Leaves of Autumn

These are not the leaves of autumn, these husks;
They died so young, fallen from the summer-burnt oaks
Leaving the lingering limbs barren of green
A struggle of woody cells against the drought

They wear no celebratory colors
Nothing of red or gold to catch the sun
For they died of thirst in their lost-green youth
Never reaching the October they had earned

These are not the leaves of autumn, oh, no
But only shells dry-rattling in the wind

The Sea-Road to Constantinople

                 For Tod on his Birthday

A coastal lugger wallows in the waves
Almost adrift in its poor steerageway
Slow-yawing northeast from the blue Aegean
Into the soft-murmuring Marmara.
Athens is in the past, and soon, ahead,
Constantinople’s walls will catch the dawn.
Our sticks, our packs, a space upon the deck
A book of verse, a cup, a spoon, a bowl,
Some prayers the priest was pleased to copy out
For us poor pilgrims who with weary feet
Were pleased to board a northbound boat at last
And rest through sunlit days with pipes alight
And words and prayers afloat among the sails,
Among the gulls that circle ‘round the mast.
All travelers pray for their hearts’ desires
To wait for them ashore at journey’s end;
For us, ours is to serve the Emperor -
A little further, there beyond the stars.

For Tod on his Birthday

A coastal lugger wallows in the waves
Almost adrift in its poor steerageway
Slow-yawing northeast from the blue Aegean
Into the soft-murmuring Marmara.
Athens is in the past, and soon, ahead,
Constantinople’s walls will catch the dawn.
Our sticks, our packs, a space upon the deck
A book of verse, a cup, a spoon, a bowl,
Some prayers the priest was pleased to copy out
For us poor pilgrims who with weary feet
Were pleased to board a northbound boat at last
And rest through sunlit days with pipes alight
And words and prayers afloat among the sails,
Among the gulls that circle ‘round the mast.
All travelers pray for their hearts’ desires
To wait for them ashore at journey’s end;
For us, ours is to serve the Emperor -
A little further, there beyond the stars.

Lawrence Hall, HSG
[email protected]

   A Band of Brothers in Which Some are More Brothers than Others

                          Dedicated to the Secretary of Defense


  There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
  There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.

                     -Kipling, “The Last of the Light Brigade”


American soldiers are a band of brothers
Of course the regs apply to some but not to others

Those who fight in the field are sometimes led
By generalissimos comfy back home in bed

If a private in battle really shows his mettle
His commander awards himself another medal

And when that combat action is called to a halt
The private nurses his wounds; the Pentagon single-malt

A poor homeless veteran might suffer hunger and need
His old general is cozy at Walter Reed

They say that Army recruiting is totally flat
Oh, yes, dear brother, there are reasons for that!

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                     President Doctor Jill’s
                    Really, Really Secret Service Beefcake Boys

                    O that he were here to write me down an ***! But,
                    masters, remember that I am an ***; though it not be
                    written down, yet forget not that I am an ***.

                    -Dogberry, Constable of the Watch,
                    Much Ado About Nothing, IV.ii.76ff

Swimming-pool chums, closer than a brother
Flexing their guns and tats at each other

Nobody know who the new agents are
(Wanna ‘phone, wanna flat, wanna shiny new car?)

Want some shiny new tech toys, loads and loads?
What’ll you take for those nuclear codes?

Hunter’s good buddies living large on the beach
One says he misses his Colombian peach

$30K a month down in Malibu
To protect an artist (but not me or you)

Nothing to see here; now don’t get nervous
For we are the party-hearty Secret Service!

(Say, babe, what’s your sign? You come here often...?)

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

       The Secret Service Says: Our Computers Ate Our Homework

Grown women in Colombia, little girls back home
Beating up a woman in a Jerusalem bar
Drunk and disorderly wherever they roam
(Say, Mr. Pence, just step into our car...)

A funny thing, those messages gone missing
And wanting to take the VP - for a ride?
Maybe it was Dear Leader’s * they were kissing
So what has our SS got to hide?

So, yes, we’re all a little bit nervous
About the weirdos and drunks in our Secret Service

Lawrence Hall, HSG
[email protected]

                         The Secret Service Whisking Away

The Secret Service are often said
To whisk their suspects away

The Secret Service are sometimes said
To whisk a president away

Do they use those little brooms?