41 thoughts on “Obsidian Wings Poetry Slam #2!”

  1. Let’s go, then. No apologies to Harry Belafonte, although I will offer them to Davinci’s Notebook… 😉
    Moe
    Blog, blog, blog some more-a, blog the party line
    Blog, blog, blog some more-a, blogging all the time
    Link, click, read and track back, work without a dime;
    Blog, blog, blog some more-a, blogging all the time
    Our blog’s name is O-B-Wi. I tell you friends it is nifty.
    When we’re surfing oh, brother,
    We’re clicking through in all kinds of weather.
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    O-kay! I believe you. (3 times)
    Click to the site, to see the full cite.
    Oh!
    Blog, blog, blog…etc.
    You can talk about Insty, Redstate, Kos or Cal Monthly.
    O-B-Wi’s keeping it flowing.
    Get in to the talking and see where it’s going.
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    O-kay! I believe you.
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    Don’t Dowd me, Child!
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    FEAR THE PIGEONS!!
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    Oh!
    Blog, blog, blog…etc.
    O-B-Wi she’s unnatural, downright counter-fact-ual.
    Left and Right with no killing;
    When we start up the haiku, the poetry get thrilling.
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    O-kay! I believe you.
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    “Show us your primary sources!”
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    SNIPER KITTEN!
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    Oh!
    Blog, blog, blog…etc.
    O-B-Wi blogs as we like to. Left to Right we delight to.
    And when we get a bit burned out,
    We Poetry Slam and dance with the turn out.
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    O-kay! I believe you.
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    Mr… Johnny Cash!
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    O-kay! I believe you.
    Jump to the site, to see the full cite.
    Oh!
    Blog, blog, blog…etc.

  2. I’m wearing no pants
    (And fifteen minutes early, too!)

    You have a deadline for taking off your pants?

  4. Past the Dogma Whirls
    EdWard’s Totally unPC Poem

    Well, the East Coast Dems can flip
    But still we dig their savoir faire
    And the Southern Reps, with the way they rig,
    They hang some wicked chads down there
    The midwest farmers vote for
    Whiche’re side will subsidize
    And the Northern hook and bullet kin
    They keep their guns Right by their sides.
    I wish they all could see Past the Dogma
    I wish they all could see Past the Dogma
    I wish they all could see Past the Dogma Whirls

    yeah, so “Whirls”…like what’s that?
    Hey, yeah? Well GET OFF MY BACK!!!
    Sorry…lot’s of stress at work today.

  6. I’m off to dinner
    At Rubicon I’ll eat it
    Yea! the client pays
    You bastard! I worked
    around the corner from there
    several years.
    Never got to eat there though…

  7. Fall of the towers
    Autumn in New York: burning
    leaves fall like planes.
    House fallen, son dead
    Mother calls on God to hear;
    same in any language.
    Gold speaks smooth-tongued
    seductive, persuasive, wrong
    oily whispering.

  8. You have a deadline for taking off your pants?
    Does not everyone?
    Six o’clock, right on the nose
    The trousers drop (wheeee!)

  13. I wish that you perverts would keep on your clothes
    The thought of y’all naked is really quite gross
    Even my dog here’s so scared he could pee
    From the thought of you all, in full nudity

  14. There once was a blogger named von
    Who wrote at a friendly dot-com
    He’s a poetry leader,
    But quoth all the readers:
    Oh, please won’t you keep your pants on?
    Commission report
    Arrives to no small fanfare:
    Everybody’s fault!

  15. Just for you, Phillip.
    It is oft seen that those who wear not clothes
    Are found to fret of sun and cold and rain
    Most of their days and nights – but no man knows
    Sorrow like those attacked by cruel disdain
    Or perhaps e’en the lash of scorn and wrath
    By those that lack blemish or flabby flesh
    Unlike those souls forced cruelly down the path
    Clothed, hot, sweaty, dirty, unfresh.
    Keep hold thy scorn: I proudly note my need –
    Need to keep my skin free from burn and ice –
    And no matter how my soul might beg and plead
    Kept on my clothes shall be, because I’m nice.
    Especially now, with sun in summer;
    Degree-burns – any! – always a bummer.

  21. SESTINA: ON POLITICS AND PANTS
    Inscrutable is the world of online blogs.
    Some writers write without their pants.
    Opinions run the range of politics:
    Some complain about Kerry,
    Some about Bush,
    Some, even still, about Clinton.
    Ah, how we miss the days of Clinton!
    What fodder he would give us for our blogs:
    His sins more juicy than those of mundane Kerry,
    A world of trouble unleashed from in his pants;
    Sandwiched between the two Presidents Bush,
    ‘Twas an amusing time for politics.
    We’ve grown more surly since in politics,
    We’re all now Scaife to our own personal Clinton;
    Team Bush spouts negative attacks on Kerry
    And “Anyone But Bush” plagues lefty blogs.
    Each side accuses the other of flaming pants,
    ‘Til we’re all sick of Kerry and of Bush.
    First, let us consider the case of Bush:
    Latecomer to Dad’s trade of politics,
    Brought to success by the seat of his pants,
    He was elected (sort of) after Clinton
    And his term’s been marked of late, in news and blogs,
    Of whether he could be displaced by Kerry.
    “Of course, he’s no great shakes,” Dems say of Kerry,
    “But we’re so sick of Bush’s politics
    That we’ll defend our John in fiery blogs
    And hope that he can save us from George Bush.”
    Meanwhile, the pundits dream of Hillary Clinton
    Or what’s been stowed in Sandy Berger’s pants.
    Is Mr. Kerry’s speech too fancy-pants?
    Is Bush consistent, unlike wavering Kerry?
    (Let’s just say this: John, you’re no Bill Clinton.)
    But is the team of this insipid Bush
    And Richard F*cking Cheney better politics?
    The debate’s still clogging up the blogs.
    The left sides craves and pants for “no more Bush!”
    The right recoils at Kerry’s politics.
    And ghosts of Clinton haunt poetic blogs.

  22. 1.
    One hemisphere wide
    Nagoya to Detroit time
    Can’t smoke or drop trou
    2.
    Summer festival
    Flying colors all around
    One squid on a stick
    3.
    Waves rise from the road
    Hello Kitty fan turns slow
    A cold bath beckons

  27. First of four—don’t worry, I’m posting them in decreasing order of seriousness.
    Interesting Times
    The stewardesses scream. The co-pilot opens the cockpit to see what’s wrong.
    The jet makes a sudden turn and plows into the North Tower.
    The other plane, they later say, was going so fast it almost disintegrated before it hit.
    The evacuation order comes over the loudspeaker.
    The stairwells fill too quickly.
    The people on the upper floors call their wives.
    The ash rains over the coffee and donut trucks on Wall Street.
    The refugees stream over the Brooklyn Bridge.
    The emergency rooms are prepared, the young residents’ faces set.
    The ambulances do not arrive.
    The blood donations replenish supplies at midwestern hospitals.
    The posters–it feels wrong to avoid them, but they are too hard to look at.
    The President makes a speech, and an uneasy wait begins.
    The bombers begin their runs over Kandahar a few weeks later.
    The Northern Alliance advances slowly, and then suddenly
    the Taliban has fled Kabul for the caves.
    The women take off their burkas and walk outside, but do not stay;
    the city streets are not safe after dark. The provinces, they are never safe.
    The Hart Senate Office building is evacuated, then
    the National Enquirer office, then Rockefeller Plaza.
    The plane crash in Rockaway turns out to be a mechanical failure.
    The mail is irradiated and opened with rubber globes.
    The doctors reassure their patients.
    The doctors write Cipro prescriptions for their families.
    The flags are everywhere on your street.
    The seventh inning stretch now features a bald eagle named Challenger.
    The mayor has become an honest-to-God national hero,
    the same ornery man hated by half the city a few months ago.
    The crowds outside the embassy in Tehran are all Americans.
    The crowds outside the Atlanta state house are all New Yorkers.
    The normal rhythm of days returns slowly.
    The New York Times editorial page criticizes Giuliani.
    The late night talk show host nervously cracks a joke.
    The Red Sox fans, after much soul searching, decide the Yankees still do suck.
    The southern politicians remember the northeastern cities are dens of iniquity.
    The homeland security budget is adjusted accordingly.
    The newspapers mourn the loss of national unity, but honestly it’s a relief.
    The sense of living in history fades.
    The law school applications and wedding plans take precedence.
    The subway riders feel safe enough to get bored again, stare blankly again at
    the podiatrists’ ads which are now required to salute New Yorkers’ strength and courage.
    The skyline no longer looks hollow.
    The precise moment is hard to identify,
    the day you realize that we are definitely going to invade.
    The president furrows his brow and assumes an expression of resolve.
    The smoking gun cannot be a mushroom cloud.
    The Senate cannot risk a real debate in an election year.
    The plane crashes in Eveleth. The security council is a bad soap opera.
    The city of Baghdad looks nothing like it did in 1991.
    The night vision goggles help a little, but on the war’s first day
    the CNN footage makes you nauseous. You tell yourself not to be an idiot;
    the hawks really have the better humanitarian argument, and they say
    the civilian casualties are miraculously low. But you can’t shake
    the fear that this is a terrible mistake, and the burning buildings are much too familiar.

  28. First of four—don’t worry, I’m posting them in decreasing order of seriousness.
    Interesting Times
    The stewardesses scream. The co-pilot opens the cockpit to see what’s wrong.
    The jet makes a sudden turn and plows into the North Tower.
    The other plane, they later say, was going so fast it almost disintegrated before it hit.
    The evacuation order comes over the loudspeaker.
    The stairwells fill too quickly.
    The people on the upper floors call their wives.
    The ash rains over the coffee and donut trucks on Wall Street.
    The refugees stream over the Brooklyn Bridge.
    The emergency rooms are prepared, the young residents’ faces set.
    The ambulances do not arrive.
    The blood donations replenish supplies at midwestern hospitals.
    The posters–it feels wrong to avoid them, but they are too hard to look at.
    The President makes a speech, and an uneasy wait begins.
    The bombers begin their runs over Kandahar a few weeks later.
    The Northern Alliance advances slowly, and then suddenly
    the Taliban has fled Kabul for the caves.
    The women take off their burkas and walk outside, but do not stay;
    the city streets are not safe after dark. The provinces, they are never safe.
    The Hart Senate Office building is evacuated, then
    the National Enquirer office, then Rockefeller Plaza.
    The plane crash in Rockaway turns out to be a mechanical failure.
    The mail is irradiated and opened with rubber globes.
    The doctors reassure their patients.
    The doctors write Cipro prescriptions for their families.
    The flags are everywhere on your street.
    The seventh inning stretch now features a bald eagle named Challenger.
    The mayor has become an honest-to-God national hero,
    the same ornery man hated by half the city a few months ago.
    The crowds outside the embassy in Tehran are all Americans.
    The crowds outside the Atlanta state house are all New Yorkers.
    The normal rhythm of days returns slowly.
    The New York Times editorial page criticizes Giuliani.
    The late night talk show host nervously cracks a joke.
    The Red Sox fans, after much soul searching, decide the Yankees still do suck.
    The southern politicians remember the northeastern cities are dens of iniquity.
    The homeland security budget is adjusted accordingly.
    The newspapers mourn the loss of national unity, but honestly it’s a relief.
    The sense of living in history fades.
    The law school applications and wedding plans take precedence.
    The subway riders feel safe enough to get bored again, stare blankly again at
    the podiatrists’ ads which are now required to salute New Yorkers’ strength and courage.
    The skyline no longer looks hollow.
    The precise moment is hard to identify,
    the day you realize that we are definitely going to invade.
    The president furrows his brow and assumes an expression of resolve.
    The smoking gun cannot be a mushroom cloud.
    The Senate cannot risk a real debate in an election year.
    The plane crashes in Eveleth. The security council is a bad soap opera.
    The city of Baghdad looks nothing like it did in 1991.
    The night vision goggles help a little, but on the war’s first day
    the CNN footage makes you nauseous. You tell yourself not to be an idiot;
    the hawks really have the better humanitarian argument, and they say
    the civilian casualties are miraculously low. But you can’t shake
    the fear that this is a terrible mistake, and the burning buildings are much too familiar.

  29. argh! damn you double posts!
    Here’s #2:
    Like a Noo Yawker
    She doesn’t know the word for what she is to this city.
    Born in a 3-bedroom north of Chelsea, but her family moved soon after,
    and her memories begin beneath snowbanks in Maine.
    Feels honor-bound, when asked where she is from,
    to answer sheepishly, “Long Island–Nassau County”.
    Likes to believe, without any real evidence for it, that
    it’s because of those early years in Manhattan
    that she can fall asleep between express stops.
    It is on the subway, a late night F train from Carroll Gardens,
    that the right word finally comes to her:
    An apprentice, that’s what she is,
    taking careful notes on how to crease the Times
    with one hand on a crowded rush hour car.
    She’s an indifferent seatmate, narrow shouldered
    but always twisting around to look at the map
    to count the lines she’s ridden so far this summer:
    The one nine, two three, four five and six. All the numbers, then,
    if she takes the seven out to Shea in August.
    The C, the E, the F, the J, the N and R, the V,
    and one of the orange lettered lines
    she can never keep straight–either the B or the Q.
    An impressive list, as many as a real New Yorker….
    But you’d never catch a real New Yorker counting, would you;
    not after she had graduated the sixth grade. Damnit.
    She’s close, but she needs to learn to take this place for granted.
    Give her that, an apartment search, a four square foot kitchen,
    and next time someone asks where she’s from, she can answer,
    with shoulders squared and conscience clear, “Brooklyn.”

  30. This one’s similar to the last, but why not:
    Revised View of The World From Ninth Avenue
    I.
    It began as a deliberately pointless conversation
    with my sister, stuck in traffic last Saturday afternoon.
    The topic: whether the East Side or West Side of Manhattan
    would win in a fight. The boundary: Fifth Avenue.
    The ground rules: no firearms, no explosives, no mercenaries
    from the outer boroughs, no handicaps for population or area.
    Before deciding whether Chelsea could beat up Murray Hill
    or Belvedere Castle could withstand an amphibious assault from the reservoir,
    we obviously needed some basic intelligence: the population,
    the terrain, how far north Washington Heights continued past Harlem,
    how far the Lower East Side stretched into the river.
    We got out the road atlas, turned to the worn page.
    And so I learned, at the age of 25, that Washington Heights
    is actually further east than the Lower East Side,
    and the Brooklyn Bridge is west of the George Washington,
    and the subway map notwithstanding,
    Manhattan’s avenues do not run straight from south to north.
    nor its streets from east to west.
    II.
    This was not so much surprising as it was heretical—
    Rand McNally’s 1999 Deluxe Edition,
    the Galileo to my Gothamocentric model of the universe.
    I could admit that the MTA map might be wrong; it did say “not to scale”,
    and I knew Central Park was not that short or wide. But was I really
    supposed to accept that I could no longer set my compass by those avenues?
    I still crossed Lexington like a tourist,
    nearly tripping over the waves the pothole patches had made
    in the asphalt because I was staring up or downtown
    all the way to the Chrysler building.
    Wondering not how they put on that silver spire,
    but how they made the street so straight.
    Now I was supposed to believe that it pointed
    in no particular direction; that meandering Broadway
    ran closer to due north? Please.
    But when I looked down again,
    the map was as stubborn as its predecessor,
    and I was no pope. “Eppur, si muove.”
    author’s notes:
    1) The title is from this famous drawing.
    2) “Eppur si muove” means “still it moves,” what Galileo supposedly said to the pope after he recanted about the earth going around the sun (almost certainly apocryphal.)
    3) Yes, this conversation & realization actually happened.

  31. Letters, They Get Letters
    Gentle readers,
    That lovable scamp Miguel Miranda has emailed me. He’s hacked into the Senate email server again, but this time he’s not doing it for partisan purposes, but to bring a little more poetry into your lives. Enjoy, and please let us know if he’s forwarded anything to you.
    To: the Democratic Caucus
    From: Dick Cheney
    Roses are red,
    Violets are blue.
    Go f*ck yourselves,
    And your mothers too.
    To: the citizens of Texas
    From: John Cornyn
    Roses are red,
    Violets are purple.
    Only I can save you,
    From man-on-box-turtle.
    To: swing state voters
    From: John Edwards
    Roses are red,
    Pickles are dill.
    I’m the son of a mill worker,
    And my dad worked in a mill.
    To: homosexual activists
    From: Rick Santorum
    You gays are so silly,
    Your feelings so delicate.
    I don’t hate you; I love you,
    as long as you’re celibate.
    P.S. But if you’re not, the terrorists have already won. No offense or anything.
    To: LISTSERV–alt.democratic.minions
    From: Hillary Clinton
    Roses are red,
    (the hour draws near. The botoxed one approaches his hometown,)
    Violets are blue.
    (Naively believing his nomination is secure)
    Sugar is sweet
    (Unaware of what lies in wait beneath the Fleet Center)
    And so are you.
    (You know your tasks. The sparrow flies at dawn. Godspeed.)
    (Miranda believes that he has found an audio tape that coincides with Senator Clinton’s message. A transcription follows.)
    (static) (45 seconds of maniacal laughter) “No, Mr. Bigglesworth, we mustn’t cc William Safire again. Get down from there RIGHT NOW!”(expletive) (expletive) (anatomic impossible act) (obscene gerund) (term that would make Dick Cheney blush). “BAD Mr. Bigglesworth!”

  32. 1) I’m repeating what others have said, but “Not idly do the pants of Lorien fall” would be the best title ever for the geekiest porn movie ever.
    2) Moe, can I convince you to cross post your 9.11 commission report haiku from redstate yesterday, and maybe also your observation on “Lepanto” from last week?

  34. Pantaloonery
    One leg at a time
    That’s how Berger stuffed ’em
    He thought it no crime
    Until Ashcroft cuffed him

  36. “2) Moe, can I convince you to cross post your 9.11 commission report haiku from redstate yesterday, and maybe also your observation on “Lepanto” from last week?”
    It means Kinko trip
    On my lunch break; however,
    I hear and obey.
    Moe
    PS: No worries, people
    About my change in lunch plans –
    Bagel place downstairs.

  37. 3 9/11 Commission Haiku Review
    The drifting snowflake
    May call forth the avalanche;
    But it’s not our fault.
    The river rages
    At the bright, placid garden –
    New agency, please.
    Bad government drones!
    Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad!
    Except Bush, Clinton.

  38. Report of the Cheney Vice Presidential Selection Advisory Committee, June 2000
    After searching from Austin to Kalamazoo,
    And from sea to shining sea,
    It’s my solemn obligation to inform you:
    The best man for the job is…me.

  39. From sleep’s cotton sea
    Into this heterogeneity of color and essence
    To discover again
    She, the Flannel Elemental
    Still in that world
    Where Baby Blue is for smell

  40. Oh. . heliophobe, how will you grow?
    And if you grow,
    And if you grow old,
    Will you recall what you drew
    here in the sand,
    earth to toe,
    while the Chariot kindly departed
    and let our beach rest cold?

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