Re: alcohol is home. by SupremeDreamer	19-Jun-18/4:55 PM
A profoundly silly piece. I can't be bothered to dig up the original Checkliste, but this bulgingly stupid offering certainly ticks a few dunce-boxes: [X] Arbitrary line breaks [X] Clerical errors [X] Cliched imagery (gazing out of window, pits of despair) [X] 'Depression' words (putrid, wretched, darkness) [X] Devoid of alliteration or any such linguistic embellishments [X] Devoid of rhyme [X] Devoid of simile, reification or any such literary devices [X] Devoid of wondrous or fantastical imagery [X] Drug reference [X] Melodramatic [X] Overabundance of ellipses [X] Pointedly unanswered questions [X] Self-obsessed -10-
Re: Wind By Any Other Name by Edna Sweetlove	31-Jan-13/3:31 PM
Preposterously self-absorbed.
Re: SWF seeks SWM by Bethy	16-Sep-08/3:36 PM
It always amuses me when, in between thinking about shoes, women sometimes find time to write poetry. Does the W stand for White? If so, isn't that racist?
Re: Suicide Note [Disposal Instructions Included] by SupremeDreamer	16-Sep-08/3:28 PM
Oil my bald cheeks.
Re: The Answer (dating over 40ish) by Bethy	16-Sep-08/3:24 PM
Your use of the word "snatch" lowered the tone rather shockingly... but I do sympathise. Unlike women, men get more attractive as they get older. They become grizzled, bearded warriors with large, masculine bellies which they use to store reserves of nutrients in case there's a war. In fact, the optimum age for a man is whatever age Sean Connery is now. Women reach their peak at 19.
Re: Ally McBeal by Pie	16-Sep-08/3:17 PM
AIDS is not suitable subject matter for poetry: I don't know about everyone else, but I want you off this site.
Re: Whispers among me by celticskatermatt1	16-Sep-08/3:15 PM
How did you come up with the idea of putting a line break between "arm stills" and "Past aggressions"? Did you think: if I don't put a line break soon, the line will end up being longer than the other lines, and then my "poem" won't look like a poem at all. Hmm?
Re: a comment on The Man Who Drooped by -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I.	24-Jul-08/5:10 AM
Yes. You're the protagonist. And Dovina plays the object of your drooping desires. I, on the other hand, am but a humble prune.
Re: a comment on The Man Who Drooped by -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I.	11-Jun-08/8:00 AM
....Your words hurt me... Would a dunce have rhymed "cloister" with "moister", or "tune" with "prune"? Yes, yes, I suppose he would. But he would not have rhymed "scene" with "thee", or "sun" with "shone", or "can" with "land". Those are not dunce rhymes, as witnessed by their absence from http://rhymezone.com You should be ashamed of yourself, Stephen. Partly for your cruelty towards others, but mainly for your horrid physical appearance.
Re: a comment on Voice of the World by Dovina	8-May-08/7:06 AM
Where you go astray is in implying the necessity of Religion from the inevitability of Mystery. I can't explain why we're here, or how it all started. There are infinitely many things I don't understand-- science will explain some of them, but I know there are some things it will never explain. Does that mean I should make up an explanation, or put my faith in someone else's (necessarily made-up) explanation? Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must hang our heads in shame. I don't know if the Universe was made by a God or a He-Man or a Gelatinous Cube or a Whatever. How could I know? How could anyone know? My point is that even if there is some grand scheme, some meaningful wider context to our actions, then any such scheme is unknowable. What's left is the freedom to choose how we live our lives according to our own conscience. The christian religion offers a terrible explanation for why world is as we observe it (science is better), and constitutes an even worse basis for morality (your own conscience would be better). Even my stripped down characterisation - Christ dying for our sins so we can be saved and live in Paradise with Him - is a guffed-up abdication of responsibility. I'm going to dismiss it as such. "... reality, human existence, is infinitely baffling. One gets one explanation - the Christian, the psychological, the scientific ... but always it gets burnt off like summer mist and a new landscape-explanation appears. He suggests that the one valid reality or principal for us lies in elutheria - freedom. Accept that man has the possibility of a limited freedom and that if this is so, he must be responsible for his actions. To be free (which means rejecting all the gods and political creeds and the rest) leaves one no choice but to act according to reason: that is, humanely to all humans." John Fowles
Re: a comment on Voice of the World by Dovina	5-May-08/4:47 PM
Ok, so some nutty morals got "stuck into" religion, but that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with bathwater, right? I mean, just because parts of the Bible have been corrupted over the years by some random chumping clerics, that doesn't mean Jesus wasn't the son of God, right? Actually, wrong. For all the insanity in the Bible, by far the most extraordinary claim is that a man called Jesus was born of a virgin, was the son of an omnipotent God, and died on the cross only to come back to life and appear (rather mysteriously) to some of his followers a few days later. If you hadn't heard any of that before, and I just told you it happened, you wouldn't believe me. Why? Because it's clearly absolute fucking bollocks. And here you have a book, written God-Knows-When by God-Knows-Who, full of claptrap (by your own admission), and yet when it claims the Ultimate Claptrap you say "No! that bit of ridiculousness is true, the 'do not eat bats' rest was written by a monk in the fourteenth century!" Even if you take the Christ (duh) story in isolation, and treat it as some sort of moral lesson, it still gets us nowhere. The fundamental tenet of Christianity is that Christ (duh) died on the cross for our sins so that we may be forgiven and go to Heaven. Is it a good thing for an innocent man to heap all the injustice in the world on his own head, and pay for it via the medium of some obscene sacrifice? Does such an act absolve us in any way? Think about it. It's not justice: it's fourteenth century psychobabble.
Re: Trust by hobojo	22-Feb-08/7:55 PM
This is exemplary of your talent.
Re: a comment on Trust by hobojo	22-Feb-08/7:52 PM
Wait, now I get it. Conflicting tense. I feel shame.
Re: a comment on Trust by hobojo	22-Feb-08/7:49 PM
What's wrong with "drown"? I drown You drown He/She/It drowns We drown You drown They drown Conjugate the mutherfucking verb you chump.
Re: plea bargain by malpaso	22-Feb-08/7:41 PM
Quality. I love the line breaks before and after "see nothing deep". How on Earth did you come up with that? Pure instinct I guess...
Re: Delicate hearts grow thick skins. by Nepanthe	22-Feb-08/7:37 PM
Reads like the ramblings of a toothless simpleton. Are you semi-literate, or what? Self-referential poemes are exceedingly bow'ls. But this is not. This is bum-crushingly stupid. For that you should be proud.
Re: a comment on Voice of the World by Dovina	1-Feb-08/6:35 PM
Sociopathy is a mental deformity. It has nothing to do with whether or not you believe in Jesu. I have never implied otherwise. An no, I don't think instinct is magic. Ironically for you, that's what a religious person thinks. He thinks the world and everything that's in it was made by a magic man floating around in another dimension. I think instinct is a product of evolution. It's to our species' advantage that we have the capacity for empathy and co-operation. You can see similar traits in other social animals, like elephants, or chimps. Finally, your point about humanist morality being derived from religion is the opposite of the truth. Nearly all religions (even ones you must think are made up) share common basic morals (don't murder, steal, lie, be gay, etc.) They all make wildly different claims about the nature of God, and they all have their fair share of claptrap morals (don't eat bats), but on the fundamentals they tend to agree. Why? Because they are man-made, not God-made, and it's human nature to behave in that way. If you truly think our basic morals are God's invention, then presumably you're of the opinion that before Moses came down from the top of Mount Sinai, the Israelites went about the place killing, stealing, lying, and adulterating at will.
Re: a comment on Voice of the World by Dovina	28-Jan-08/2:25 PM
Your arrogance has swollen so far beyond thunderdome that it has retracted into its own balls and is now fuelling a second -=Even_Bigger_Arrogance=- that will blot out the sun and be gay. To your first point, I agree religion can force a moral consensus (usually by threat of divine punishment), but obviously that's only an intra-denominational consensus. When it comes to forging consensus between people of a different faiths, its record is APPALLING. It has done more to divide the human race than just about anything else, with some unbelievably violent consequences. I'm ashamed of you. Secondly, are you seriously arguing for religion on the grounds that it speeds up moral decision making? (a) I don't think that's worth considering in the first place, and (b) even if it was, religion is probably one of the more long winded routes to making moral decisions, because it relies on Revealed Truth rather than any innate sense of conscience (you've got to trawl through some pretty obscure Bible verses before you discover that eating bats is wrong... or have you committed Deuteronomy to memory?) Finally, there are many value systems that have nothing to do with God. Chiefly because healthy people do not require a divine spark to realise that murder is naughty. Probably the most popular among atheists is secular humanism, but an individual's value system is really inspired by a myriad of factors, from their formative years at a Respected Public School, to whether or not they get a 2:1 in Combined Media Studies from Loughborough University. And nearly all literature (to name but one of the Arts) informs morality in some way: Dickens, Orwell, Burgess, Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Tolkien, Stephen King's It, and so on. There isn't just One Book, One Chosen People, One Jesu (but if there had to be One Book, that book would be Bravo Two Zero by Andy McNab.)
Re: a comment on Voice of the World by Dovina	27-Jan-08/4:09 PM
That should be "un--=Dark_Angel=--like".
Re: a comment on Voice of the World by Dovina	25-Jan-08/4:12 PM
Perhaps you've been eating too many bats.