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Akin to a lunar launch, there's a relative blackout of news this week from the Albuquerque slam poetry team, competing in Austin for the 2007 Nationals.

We won't know until this evening if team members are moving on as semifinalists. That's how far they got last year as defending champions from 2005.

While we wish them well, I have other poetry concerns this week. And they're not from having to dog-sit a poet's pooch while he's in Austin.

My concern's name is Foster Hall. A 61-year-old Vietnam veteran, he resides at the spinal cord injury center at the Albuquerque Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Hall suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in Vietnam. When he was a 21-year-old grunt, he was in a firefight and ended up holding the brain matter of a fellow grunt named Bill in the back of a Chinook.

I had heard about Hall in passing in slam poetry circles. He attended his first slam event in fall 2006 at the defunct Blue Dragon and has been hooked ever since.

During my visit to his room at the VA this week, we very much connected, even though Hall cannot speak. If eyes are the ultimate form of communication, he articulates volumes.

He also does quite well using a nifty communication system called Words Plus, a typing system manipulated with the back of his head and a controller on his pillow. His e-mails are a riot, a triumph of technology on a grand scale. On a simpler but equally grand scale are the paintings in the VA lobby he did using his mouth and a paintbrush.

Hall relates that the first poem that got his motor running on the subject of war was the renowned "Charge of the Light Brigade," by Lord Tennyson.

Now, he has a poetry idea with much merit: slam poetry as a therapeutic vehicle for injured veterans.

I think he's onto something here.

Slam, as it stands, is a young person's game. This spring, I attended the middle school poetry slam finals, and the word therapeutic would be an apt description in some cases.

That memory was very much in my thoughts, as I read over Hall's proposal to try and get a veterans slam program established.

He has enlisted the help of Don McIver, a local slam stalwart, and Bill Nevins, the Rio Rancho High School humanities teacher and slam poetry team coach who was fired while defending one of his students' anti-war poems. The principal demanded that the poem be destroyed and the team disbanded. The situation was the subject of a compelling movie, "Committing Poetry in Times of War."

To Hall, slam poetry has a much closer-to-the-bone association to feelings of battle than what he felt submitting pieces to the publication Veterans' Voices — a well meaning exercise, in his view, but ultimately not a help.

In his words, "Why would slam poetry be more attractive to all volunteer casualties of war than a traditional therapeutic writing program? As the name implies, slam poetry is a seemingly fast-paced, violent, in-your-face, interactive, creative expression of all emotional paradigms of human existence that can pump nurturing passion for life through the veins. It ain't poetry for sissies nor Nobel laureates — yet."

Well said.

As more soldiers return from battle with injuries and trauma, there are a lot of programs popping up to help, including, as reported by the BBC, the use of parrots as therapy. I'm sure there's value in this, but you can stop the tape when the interviewed psychologist, regarding these animals, claims, "they develop disorders just like veterans in combat do."

Pardon me if I just can't go there.

Something tells me a veteran exorcising war demons through slam poetry will have a much better result than stroking a bird's feathers.

Win, lose or draw, I'm sure the returning Albuquerque slam team will have a terrific experience.

Foster Hall, however, has a much bigger goal in mind for the power of slam poetry.