outgoing?
I'd say outspoken
never been arbitrary
or overbearing-
just vocal

my passion runs deep
and pours out
excited
overflowing
when it finds
another soul to share it with

the energy
others direct towards me
I absorb
and like a mirror
reflect it back towards them

the energy
that rests inside me
is like water
waiting
for an outside force
to heat me up
excite
my molecules
or
to cool me down
mellow
the chaos inside me
making me stable
making me solid

if being an extrovert
makes me
popular and
domineering,
a fun-loving,
party animal
who lacks introspection,

tell me why
I always choose
to isolate myself

why
my few friends I do have
I keep at a distance
except when I force myself
to enjoy their company
once or twice
in a year

why
I am easily talked over
my words drowned out
ignored
like background noise
my input
apbrubtly halted
as others drive over it
making it no more
than the dust
their tires kick up
why I let them
talk over me
rather than raise my voice

why I would rather
read in solitude
than go to a party
or play a video game
rather than socialize
why
would I choose
to ponder existence
over
existing with others

extroverted
means I get my energy
from external events
rather than the internal

I am not a synonym
for gregariousness

Fireworks and vivid chaos,
blinding lights in the pitch black sky.
The sudden gregariousness,
cross-dissolving into one's sigh.

Back home in a blanket,
hot chocolate in hand.
A wandering mind, hardly cognizant,
unleashing one's disguise.

With the shutter open
to evacuate life's scenes,
revealing only those broken
in one mind's eye.

Fading rapidly from awareness,
once immersive, now an indistinct sight.
The suttle gregariousness,
has all but gone dry.

male blanket octopus:
size of a thumbnail, you peel off
your wriggling *****-filled
hectocotylus, cut your own arm
as a gift of love to a female
the size of kobe bryant
i imagine you van-gogh,
whispering "keep this object
like a treasure" as your unbloody
*** arm curls up in the safety of her
mantle, as you slink away to quiet
obscurity, as you find somewhere
dark and alone to finally die, giving
up your body as food, giving everything,
and i envy you your unobtrusiveness, wish
i could be free of ego and gregariousness, and
i envy your pure dedication to purpose, wish
i knew so firmly my life's end, wish
i knew anything

Heart of darkness
transcend some light
you confused the body and soul.

Heart of darkness
your youthful years
were gracious and gleaming
you loved with gregariousness.

Heart of darkness
blindsided by *******
it saturated the body and soul

Heart of darkness
forgive and forget
ratify a truce with love,
Let love in.

Heart of darkness
bruises heal in time
in love there is fear
however, perfect love
casts aside doubt.

Heart of darkness
sadness interferes with hope
we were saved in this hope
hope that is seen is not hope
leaving only trust.

Heart of darkess
the essence of hope
the secret to victorious living
lies in seeing good
in every situation that comes into our lives

Heart of darkness
Let love in....

he slipped quite quietly out of his own mind,
roaming free, letting go,
consumed with a curiosity of what he might find,
sliding through shadows into the darkest cascades,
skipping past sancturies,
some hidden, some buried,
like treasures from the everglades,
gregariousness a thing of the past,
as the lightness grew dim,
into himself he became a murmur of a forgotten mask,
scattered and shattering like a flightless fawned bird,
he screamed, he stomped, he wailed,
but swamped in his black anguish,
all he felt echoed thin into the nothingness
and remained unheard

My roommates and I
always have something to say.
We talk incessantly, like chirping birds.

We’re all reading the same large print here, and It suggests that college is almost over.
We’re bleeding time and there are dreams in need of scheming.
It’s time to stack our chips with transactional relationships and hoard the things that matter most.

I have to admire the sheer attitude and bravado of these girls—their defiant strides,
as they face the invisible indignities and constant obstacles of job hunting.
(Where they’re required to behave while they’re observed and evaluated).

They have their resumes and they’re complaisantly ready to flex their appealing gregariousness.
All of the major playas are passing through—from established giants like (Amgen, Bayer and Genentech)
to biotech startups and research Institutes—to cull through the herd of Yale biomedical graduates.

I don’t get to play (interview) this time and it’s rough just watching the signs and plays from the sidelines.
I can’t help the feeling that I’m underperforming—even though my ‘Master of Public Health (MPH)’ program starts 10 days after we graduate. ‘Baby, I was born to run’— to steal a line from Bruce Springsteen.

Despite our separate paths—we’re like cats getting ready to jump in all directions—a bouillabaisse of intoxicating and terrifying excitement for the future is brewing, and we still have the constrictions of our current curriculum to deal with—like a snake, it still wraps around every aspect of our lives.
.
.
Songs for this:
born to run by Bruce Springstein
Time by Tom Waits
.
Oh, and a Christmas playlist because—it’s December!:
https://daweb.us/xmas/Christmas_03.mp3

Six-year-old Stephen Romero,
An energetic, vibrant boy,
Was full of curiosity,
Gregariousness, life, and joy.

On Sunday morning, young Stephen
And mom were both unaware
Of what was going to happen to them
During their Sunday trip to the fair.

Keyla Salazar was called
"La luchadora"° by her dad.
The thirteen-year-old's smile was one
Of the greatest treasures her father had.

On Sunday morning, Keyla, too,
Was totally unaware
Of what she was going to encounter
During her fateful trip to the fair.

Trevor Irby, twenty-five,
Was getting ready to propose
To someone very special to him.
At least so the story goes.

On Sunday, Trevor, along with a friend,
Decided to spend a day at the fair.
Surely, they had no idea
What they were going to encounter there.

Nineteen-year-old Santino Legan,
For reasons hard to understand,
Went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival
On Sunday with his gun in hand.

There he took the lives of Stephen,
Keyla, and Trevor. More blood was shed:
Thirteen other people were injured
Before the police shot him dead.

Weep, America; weep for our youth,
Killed by messengers of hate
Because we cannot draw the line
At how much we can tolerate.

Weep, America; weep again
That access to weapons goes unchecked.
Weep for murdered ones whose lives
Our lawmakers are supposed to protect.

Weep for all of us, for we
Cannot feel safe anywhere:
At school, at work, at stores, at concerts,
At places of worship, or at a fair.

-by Bob B (8-1-19)

°the fighter

Beseech God when the marooned epithets of concerted factitious pestilence swarm the fragility of any given mindset and poised circumstance embedded in concrete pangs of waged valor in the tepid waters of malevolence that test men of faith with the plodding crabwhiskers of enduring ignominy

Reach with tenacity and react with temerity to the jilted wisdom of a profligate time and return yourselves to the propriety expected not only of upstarts but also of garden-variety gentility that needs few ways to gerrymander reality so that the exclamations of praise overwhelm the din of negativism

This earth is a temporary test proctored by supernal forces that can be savage, grim, morose or commonplace but wilting in hopelessness is the machination of the schadenfreude of perilous doubt domineering over an age of rampant apostasy, an artifice for evil to flower into the dissemblance of good. Thankfully this draconian subterfuge is an eradicable foe of the stygian imprecations of an otherwise benevolent wholesome design that can recede into obscurity rather than burgeon into a self-fulfilling cycle of enmity begetting the jingoistic fervor of useless antagonism or internecine divisiveness that is fractious in its perpetual erosion of the common good

Remain vigilant in your sempiternal quest to find the modesty of better pastures more lucrative than the privation of meretricious gaudy sentimentalism that infects the world with maudlin pretense rather than perdurable righteousness that effervesces when the ultimatums of the community united by individualistic impetuses outweighs the stagnant gravitas of sobering misperceptions of pragmatism

We exist on this earth primarily but not exclusively because of the magnanimity of creation not the barbarity of destruction that besets the pathways of righteous adherence to a modernism of faithful reclamation of sportive frolicking and joyous exultation of mores that are bolted firmly in place in a configuration suitable for the cavernous prosperity of an evolving planet destined to be commodious rather than pestered by reproachable fearmongering snollygosters of killjoy damnation that condemn by jaundiced standards of hypocrisy or the deplorable bonfires of outmoded witch hunts of depraved perjury against the ‘golden rule’

Most will flicker between righteousness and evil but the prevalent force among the faithful communities is the adherence to credence in belief rather than credulousness in discord a cleavage between those who understand teleological certainty and those who vacillate with the sting of superstition corroding their intrepid resolve to engineer the ingenuity of an artful time without the beguiling artifice eroding every specious gewgaw away along with the prized consequentialism of unheralded heroism that should be bequeathed instead of neglected by the asperity of abominable rejection authored by conventional simpletons marauding with freebooter wealth and ill-gotten gains in pandered exploitation

Tides exist because the moon is the centerpiece of a grand configuration that rivets the earth with eternal lambent light and recondite guidance that withstands the vagaries of modern alienation that pivots upon primal fears and sworn enemies of the gleeful interface of flesh becoming soul and soul becoming flesh the cacoethes of life that refuses to be squelched quietly by benighted ignorance and balkanizing mythmakers who prize useful apostasy over amaranthine integrity to the ultimate veracity of God

Time is the ultimate father of existential doubts but also the solution and gradient of all empirical knowledge and it is the bedrock of primeval constellations that amaze in the foudroyant firmament that has been tested and transcended by the artifacts of modernity but never ceases to flicker with a dainty prestidigitation of the imaginative heart aspiring to be one with cosmogony rather than the insemination of a lamentable lechery with miscegenated and stilted justice

So, when the darkness of solitude and gingerly seances with wraiths of haunted memories clasp you in tenacity and acerbic derision, remember that the perfection of faith is abiding by the precepts that have rollicked and soared upon the convenience of fate without fatalism and determination without determinism
Live life boisterously when the swelling abundance of fruitful generations culminate with felicity and temper the vilification of paragons of the wrong path subside from your countenance and outlook because eternal grace exists to make the sluggish buoyant and the hubristic humble to find a rightful equipoise that exists as a mandala of perfect archetypal divinity

We falter sometimes with venial grievances or dart towards the glossolalia of the glitterati, but this world teaches us that a creative verve and a congenial panache are enough to convey the ultimate beatific goal of any virtual space that exists not just as an inclement test but as a domain for experiments in moral justification of sanctified human communities existing with irenic calm rather than bellicose velocity of depredated pristineness that should always remain inviolable despite the exhaustive nature of combustible finitude

The placid pond of peaceful accord with nature is a staple of a heeded naturalism that seeks the preservation of the sentience of earth and its dalliance with all of the blessed creatures that navigate our seas and our forests and sometimes even our homes as we unite to find communion with the vital energies of animation in a world captured in still life but never forgotten for the staid moments of contemplation that punctuate a good day or flummox a bewildered forest of tribal temptations and the shibboleths of irresponsible stewardship

The wagered war between industry and inferiority is the linchpin of all robust creative endeavors as the nutritive soil inhabited by mustard seeds gets embedded by the bonhomie of prolixity in explicating the stern juxtaposition of livid dastardly discord and beatific redemptive pulchritude… two coexisting forces that gallop by the same circumstantial waggish wits of raillery compounded by the plangent complaints of the oppressed or the exultations of the blessed

Inequity is a primordial condition arbitrated not by a Calvinist determinism but by the apportionment of divine might that is reconciled by the eleemosynary justice of a world quick to forgive and swift in magnanimity that sprawls the canvass of life with the duality of erratic sportsmanship and slugabed acquiescence because the principle of fair charity is incommensurable with the mammon of the selfish but those that transcend mere heroism and find commensurable teleological goals will heal the wounds created by the pesky urchins of infernal origin by the miraculous brunt of technology combined with an attentive tenacity to find the blotches in the tributaries that converge upon an “oceanic oneness” of a virtually infinite universe teeming with life and abounding with the kind of love that makes life worth living

We fight therefore a war that seeks ennobled intellects to wage inveighed invective against the giant tortoise created by the inertia of established monoliths of changeless malversation that stagnates or sabotages the eminence of creative titans because of the credentialed bias of quacksalver apothecaries of protean human manipulation occluding the passage of light to darkened cloisters of poverty and privation

Relics of the ancient law have been pilloried and the stultification of creed is commonplace among the dilettantes of jaundiced freebooting that hitches itself to the yoke of de facto immobility where there would otherwise exist bountiful harvests of friendly gainsay and giddy adventurisms that ameliorate the conditions of the world by the apportioned joy granted with largesse by the visionaries who defied the tropes of their quaint vestigial strictures and gallivanted with punctual temerity towards the favor of the Lord and The Way

Bureaucratic gridlock is the prodrome of an improper concordance with misguided altruism conflated with the boondoggles of trepidation that quivers like a reflexive dependency on banausic pretense hardly worth the limelight of regal consideration because a free-for-all flotilla of endless trinkets proffered by the resourceful but malicious prestidigitation of engorged coffers is not a tenet of true altruism but in fact a malady of duplicitous despotism seeking control in a world ennobled by feral gregariousness rather than huddled conformity around a collectivist bonfire of pilfered dearth
To follow “The Way” is to look beyond pettifoggery in deliberation or the limits of reasonable enumerated consideration and instead to ferret out the sordid from the irreproachable and strike compromise without ontological fault or deontological violation a reclaimed theology modernized and galvanized by not gaudy artificialism but by a generous heap of empathy enriched by the approximation of sympathy that is never certain it knows the boundaries of sentient despair or enlivened beatitude but that is careworn enough to reach the frayed limits of possible consideration that fathoms the prolific wisdom of vicarious destiny

Happenstance often dictates the gamut of opportunity and meted justice sometimes falters on the side of dreary expanses of untenanted time frittered away with either streamlined attempts at etiolated purpose or aimless attempts at vilified destruction of the gambled moments we stake so much in but either way every moment is drenched in redemptive potential to be configured into reclaimed chastity or virtuoso coruscation because few things are irrevocable and many things are instructive in our pursuit of self-actualization

Heap plaudits upon the dreamy dance with creativity in sculpted destinies preordained in the aboriginal abeyance that existed before time itself was a parameter of design and relish the eternal now as the keepsake of placid recompense or dramatic stagecraft designed to amuse but never to deter our purpose through oblivious diversion painted by glibness rather than bedecked with soteriological redemption

Some poltroons stagger through life looking for the crabwise enlightenment of a parceled existence patient to abide by some nomothetic decorum and others dart toward their streamlined destinies with a galloping insistence on the clarity of a clarion purpose to be trumpeted from a perch guarded by bulwarks of sturdy poise enhanced by the bonhomie of righteous solidarity
Those that struggle are tempered by the contingencies of tentative conditions of worth rather than predestined for a vouchsafed failure by design and most people are capable of transcending the wilted anachronisms of dragooning leviathans that withhold autarky to create dependency and trample over divinity to meet expediency in credulous goals that are at odds with viable cohesiveness of design.

The pressures exist to reform our system of codified law not so that it is more procrustean but so that the promethean and herculean forces of nature that enshrine liberty can exert their jaunty exceptionalism for a revived human fraternity in an age of virtualized demassification of loneliness amalgamated by trite rewards for the farcical pretense of banausic conformity exacerbated by the warped genocide of dreamers by utopian conformists who seek nothing more than a tractable pragmatism rather than a capricious diversity of thought, conduct and soldered unity around worthy rather than factitious ideals

The absolutisms of wretched quotidian deliverance from the modern maladies of isolative individuality need to converge upon an outcome that touts some elements of pragmatism but flickers with sempiternal ambitions for livelihood and the faultless regalia of love even when chiseled away at by the bickering of loss and the jaded emeralds of keepsake infatuations evaporating with the cruelty of timeworn contrition and attrition but abnegation only leads to abreaction and the original simpers of inhibition only lead to a glowering lament of what was squandered rather than what was achieved

Seek in life the memorialized glimmer of daunting promises becoming realized certainties that span the ages with timeless wisdom that withstands the vagaries and vicissitudes of aleatory yields that kowtow only to the fertility of gilded opportune purpose rather than the permanence of hallowed relevance to any era beset by portentous pestilence undergirded by groveled heaps of graft or ennobled with swanky prosperity because of the proper apportionment of useful proprieties that are rarefied by sidereal encounters with glitz and chance discoveries of serendipity

The trajectory of divinity is enigmatic because muddled prescience is the prerogative of cherubim that drape themselves with the hedged verdure of secrecy in their furtive attempts to engineer reality but find themselves corrupted by insightful ploys of bonanza guarded by rigmarole and obfuscation commandeered by ignoble wraiths of malicious dereliction bolted to the rudimentary rivets of overriding mammon

Despite this infiltration of sidereal gambits by the sworn benefactors of the progeny of the modern human condition our optimism should graze on the fact that destiny is ultimately the bailiwick of the supreme architect of all axiomatic laws and the lord of all sentient creations that graze upon the pabulum of ascendant times for the barnacles of ingenuity and the creatures of generosity whose largesse enlarges the scope of human endeavors and creates a cyclical expansion of the imaginative prowess of all beings through the tug and tide of dreams that become more extravagant over time because of or despite cultural enrichment or decline

The new paradigm is convalescent because it swerves away from both erratic wretched apathy of destructive manipulation or glorified embalmed foofaraw for sedentary immobility and dares with picaresque flair to challenge the authenticity of established narratives not with a paltry antinomian cavil or a slick Astroturf protest but with a strident mentality of newfangled inventiveness and careful altruism that vouchsafes the decline of opprobrium and the renewal of the righteous pursuit of happiness that extends beyond fugacious memories of judgmentalism that is self-neglectful but of second chances of munificence offered freely to the barnacles of just deeds and proper words

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                            Your Poems as Love-Letters to God


          Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether
          they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals
          seek the truth, and they break with those who don’t love it
          sufficiently.

                 -Doctor Zhivago, p. 9 in the Pantheon edition


You live, you have lived, and you will live
And because you live you will engrave your life
In elegant scansion, in noble lines
That shape chaos into beauty and truth

Not into metal or rocks or wood
But flung into Creation in gratitude
For the sacred life you have been given
For the strength of your love and thoughts

Each little line is a gathering-gift to God
Baptized in the Jordan and in the Hippocrene
To God, and to the Muses who smile on you
And to great Mysteries beyond the stars

Each little line is a gathering-gift to all
To read in the light of seven sacred lamps
The wisdom of patience and pilgrimage
Beside the banks of the river you know

You live, and so you write, you must, you must:
For there is meaning in tumbling in the grass
On a summer day that will live forever
Helped along in your written remembrancing

You live an eternal meaning in the why
Of laughter and puppy-kissings and grass-stained jeans
And that is why you must write it all down
For others in intellectually-sharpened rhythms

You live an eternal meaning in the why
Of love, of deeper kissings in the dark
Emotional confusions gone crazy-wild
Until they are sensed through crafted verse

You live an eternal meaning in the why
Of recruit training and sometimes war
The joys of learning wisdom from great books
Tentatively shaping your own new knowledge worthily

You live an eternal meaning in the why
Of leafy springs and apple-green summers
Golden autumns and winters of blue
Writing them as hymns of gratitude

You live an eternal meaning in the why
Of children in a home modest in wealth
But rich and layered in love, work, and prayer
“Is this poem about me?!” Oh, yes, child

You live an eternal meaning in the why
Of lonely nights, hospital stays, mistakes
Disappearing dreams, disappointed hopes
Memories of friends buried in the dust

You live, you have lived, and you will live
And because you live you will engrave your life
Love-letters as your gift to Creation
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti

Watching the Light go out


Brightly colored
fire driven lantern
rises steadily, purposefully,
growing smaller
carries it’s brightness
into a vast mellow sunset
to remember a life
whose light
flickered in years of confusion
and then went out.

I watch
remembering lost words,
lost smiles, lost cognition,
suffering,
that ever so gradually stole his light
his wit, gregariousness
his very person.

I will the light not to disappear
my eyes track it
my heart  tugged along
until it becomes a dot
and disappears into the vastness of eternity.

I say, goodbye,
call my heart back
to the ground under my feet
to the lights and voices around me,
to life without the light that went out.