That Japanese thing about ants:
Yoko Ono (but worse) at first glance,
Is an improvisation
Producing frustration
In readers, when given a chance…


I was hoping to find a bit more
In Sawako’s ridiculous Score;
But her total is zero,
This scribbling hero—
Her poem was truly a bore.

Hark—nightingales sing songs of dawning spring.
The flitting bluejays banter in the trees.
A sparrow greets a dove, and both take wing,
While robins fight with cardinals. The breeze
Bears on its unseen currents feathered tribes:
The nutfinch mothers feed their new-hatched flocks.
Now crows appear: dark jesters squawking jibes;
The swooping blackbirds protest preying hawks . . .

Strangely, some younger birds attempt to moult
Confused in youthful avian revolt,
And cast off gender; ***** attempt to nest.
Chickadees chirp, proclaiming they are cats
And other fowl identify as bats.
(Their madness serves to entertain the rest.)

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                         Spectrum Cable 3

                                          For 24 April 2025

Spectrum stops working at the fall of a leaf
Such fragility! It beggars belief.

Without poetry, we'd all
be chained to fences of time.
locked in,
torn apart,
played with by the
cosmic dance.

Don't get me wrong,
the poems can't
cure cancer, or heal the
lame dog's leg.
But, they might give
the ****** hope, and the
hobos a home.

Poetry tricks the mind
into seeing things,
like woolfhounds with
bagpipes playing an
Irish jig, far away from
the ferryman and his ride
across the river.

Without poetry, about now,
my skull
would be a home for beetles
and worms, turning
ever so slowly into
dust.