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

                                    What Awakened You?

The bedside clock glows an hour you cannot read
Because your eyes of full of fuzzy sleep
And your mind of half-remembered dreams
Of a better time when – but it’s slipped away

Moonlight and moonshadows silver the silence
You went to sleep in a different world
And woke up in this one – is it the same?
At magic o’clock this one seems more real

What woke you up? A breath, a sigh, a song?
What woke you up? Maybe it was love

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” -Edgar Allan Poe

We're all sick animals, tied together
on this clouded ball. Wet snow erupts
on a Sunday night, a gray flake navy,
mobiles above a black crib -

snow loosens into shaking sleet.
There is no one here - not even me.
The night is pink and orange,
under an anesthetic dome.

Don't we deserve more, better?
The streets are filled with taillights,
red rivers of light, salted, frothing,
as the freezing drips spray the pane.

Maybe we don't. Look out there,
at the wet world. We're just seeds
that open a root to the flood, swept
away into the teeth of the past.

DOWNPOUR

The rains came down in
The darkness before dawn.
Great thundering waterfalls
That beat tattoos on metal roofs
And sailed the gutter leaves like boats
In some fantastic competition
To make it to the storm drain first.

In this parched and arid state
It waked up sleepers with a start
Who rushed to roll up windows in the car.
And sent the teenaged paper boy
Rushing after plastic bags.
In thirty minutes it was gone
And you would never know it rained.

So thirsty is Nevada soil
That deluge never is enough.
The Monsoon didn’t come this year,
The floods all happened somewhere else,
And rocky landscape withers in the torrid sun
Trying to recall the **** feel
Of moisture seeping through its stones

And every drop is Holy Water.
ljm

I had a full head of hair and you.

When I woke I had neither,
as the grey frost light
scoured my eyes true awake
I found other lies of the subconscious
hadn’t taken as hard
as your pretend shape

no real surprise, I guess,
but that doesn’t make me hate it less

The Bluebells and the Hollyhocks
Continue to elude me.
I reach with aching finger tips into
The gardens of my mind to find them
But only Dandelions bloom amid
The Snake Grass and the Milkweed.

I fertilize my reverie
With verse from other poets
But the lyricism of their words
Is acid on my longing
And my tiny little shoot of hope
Begins to wither, and it dies.
ljm

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

                                           Rubik’s Cubicle

When a problem is solved, another spins ‘round
When that problem is solved, two others spin back
When those problems are solved, chaos begins
Everything depends on everything else

When a date is set, another unsets
When that date is set, two others get lot
When those dates are found, chaos begins
Everyone depends on everyone else

A wise man learns that chaos begins
When the Rubik’s cube of life backspins

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

                               Rod McKuen at a Garage Sale

We don’t know who Baby ****** and Tommie were
They sent each other notes and underlines
And colored slips of paper from page to page
In Someone’s Shadow (“Hardbacks 25 Cents”)

The exuberance of adolescent arcs
Reminds us of our long-ago callow youth
When we thought we had discovered something
In secretly sharing free verse in home room

And we had – indulging in forbidden lines
Is still good therapy for being sixteen

Stick to the tides,
know the ruses, the rise
and fall of lunar pulls and gravity

so when you sail
your keel will only graze
what rocks beneath

for if those barnacle-stain
kelp-slapped teeth bite,
no panicked oar stroke
will hide that crimson bloom

they smell blood from a quarter mile

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

                                  Who Betrayed Anne Frank?

A spokesman for the F.B.I.
Notes that Jewish hostages were taken
At a synagogue on Shabbos
And concludes that the attack

“Was not specifically related
To the Jewish community”