She met her old lover
on the street that night,
they ran into each other
by the corner of 77th and ‘Dam,
so she told me
and after much deliberation on her part
she found herself drinking a few beers
just out of kindness,
for she thought he was still crazy
though she still loved him
after all those years.
I wish I had met her lover,
I would have warmly shook him by the hand,
for in the way he dismissed her thoughts
An hour forward, Time again slides its hands
down my back pocket and fondles for change,
urging me to deal with the loss,
to make up Time and have an account settled early;
I wasted the moment,
I slept instead of being productive,
the type of action that would have a black mark
put aside you in a Kangaroo court of law,
the sentence…
undisclosed for now,
be satisfied, let your gloriously white teeth gnash
and grind…but hey, stop
for a minute and chew on this,
It is dangerous
to be so deluded,
that the internet for all its good
and ability to show the world
just how we strive forward in unity,
should we wish, gives a platform
to one so
bound up in her own con trick
that she can even call Australia
a place which doesn’t exist…
this modern day Atlantis,
packed to the brim with spiders
that will kill you, with Koala Bears
that are riddled with Chlamydia,
Kangaroos that made Skippy a star,
That made Paul Hogan a star,
The four in the morning
Buzz, the phone
lets out
a dying squeal of save me
in electronic Morse.
The screen is lit up
for a moment
with the legend,
battery low…
I sigh and continue to write helplessly
with a million words in mind,
all running towards
Oblivion
and I think to myself,
it’s not a competition
but I do know
how you feel.
Ian D. Hall 2017
I remember the conversation held
between the man in the stylish looking hat
and the woman who had asked him
about his inconsistent and doomed affair
and giving him advice on how to finish
with his lover; the fifty ways she mentioned
and whilst I only heard five that she recounted,
I hung around to listen further
as he pondered on how she would deal
with the same situation.
A moment, a second of silence
before she answered matter of fact,
“If all else fails Paul,
Ground down cocaine
derivative coursing through my early morning
veins, my dinner time blues and late night
saturated fat on old Jazz music
of which I cannot play a beat,
yet hear every note that the Sax man plays
in earnest down on 77th Street gun alley
where only the night before a man was killed for less
than murdering a rag time special
and looking at his killer’s broad
with a funny eye.
The late November sun catches my eye
and through the glass I take a look around the street,
We talked for a while, the great Detective writer and I
about his work, the meaning of crime
in the fields of Oxfordshire
and the bounty involved with novel murder,
between the pages,
in one sentence, the last moment of a book’s life
should be that the suspect is named
with a gasp and then nothing
else to follow,
with perhaps the damning of yet another
advert or list of books that the voyeur,
the seer of slaughter and unlawful death,
must own, at least
There is a yellow council skip
outside the house,
a small number of items
left there by a man in a hurry.
I feel cheated,
I have nothing
that I want to dispose
of but my soul.
Ian D. Hall 2017
Beyond Wigan Pier,
flat caps are worn with a sense
of irony
to the visiting football fan
that made their way through tunnels
and forgotten history book sampled landscapes
of the once industrial blackened soot North,
Orwell no longer in residence
and yet in this barbarous age,
a depression in all but name,
the great decline of the 21st Century,
but as long as you can get your nails done
and have the latest must have Playstation
diversion, then obviously the world is just great and green;
You will, no doubt,
receive your reward in Heaven,
she said to me with an air of superiority
and down at heel, run of the mill
lack of charisma; I knew she didn’t have the money
to pay me, I wasn’t doing it for reward,
just to help a fellow human being
in a moment of distress
but still
she had to bring Heaven into it,
she had to tell me that her belief,
the conviction that by doing something good
you must automatically become