Who knoes? And I thought Cain was marked.

Of course not. I was being silly. And I understand wanting to write about everything, but... well, do you see the difference between the two following poems?

HAIKU #1
Farewell, I'm off to
butcher baby seals. I mean,
folks need sealskin coats.

HAIKU #2
Off to seal-killing.
Can't have folks without coats, right?
I'm a stupid git.

Anyway, in the first you get the idea that the guy talking is right. In the second you get the correct view (which happens to be my real view), that seal-butchering is wrong. I don't see why I'd want to write the first one and not say what I thought when it would be just as easy to write the second one and say what I thought, right? Yes, I'm exaggerating, but the same thing goes for your war poem.

And no, the 'Pray for me and for the enemies too' line doesn't make up for it. That just means he knows he's killing guys just like him, who'd rather not be there, and he's doing it anyway. Why? Because he assumes, like everybody, that there's got to be war and you've got to go cause it's your duty. I disagree. If people weren't soldiers, there couldn't be war.

Yeah, but you can, like, decide not to become a soldier, right?

Yes, but do you see how someone who supports wars he doesn't understand or agree with because of duty is going to read this and say 'hey, it must be okay to support wars I don't understand or agree with. I mean, it's in a poem and poetry is never wrong'?

I think she does. But I also like it as a way of referring to unthinking hawks going for some new purposeless war before they've finished the last one (or ones).

The lives are the yeast (yeasts?). I liked the half-rhyme with love and graves and tried tons of other words, including creatures, beasts, cells, and yeasts. If you can think of something better, please let me know.

She saves them on a top cabinet shelf, I guess. Because she fancies herself the kind of wife who bakes - I'm not sure; she's not a real person. My wife does buy and save more yeast packets than she'll ever use (I thought everyone did), but the person I was really thinking of was George Bush. Discuss.

re "am I asking you to judge my shit?"

Actually, yes. Poemranker is "a cross between imaginaries.org (an online writers' workshop) and RankPeople and Hot or Not" made to "Rank the works of others on a 1-10 scale or submit your own poems for ranking". So by posting here you're kind of asking for it.

And MacFrantic cares how old you are because if you're 50 and you type like that you ought to be ashamed.

The most common mistaken assumption on poemranker is that poemranker users are all haters and they're just going to hate everything anyway and ruin everything. No, wait, that's the second most common assumption. The most common mistaken assumption on poemranker is that your poems are perfectly perfect so anyone who criticizes them must be mistaken. Congratulations.

Use some other image. Sorry, that's the best I can do.

Be better without the apostrophe.

Really? Why don't you talk-talk in double-double language like other Indians?

Yeah, like if you'd been watching Al Jazeera during the war, you would know that during the invasion of Baghdad Iraqi soldiers electrified the floor of Saddam Hussein Airport, killing over three thousand American soldiers at a blow. There were pictures. True story.

In poetry, "concrete" means the poem is in the shape of something. Do you mean to suggest this poem is shaped like a sleeve?

I know. But it took me about 15 minutes after leaving the internet cafe to realize you were probably thinking of the expression "صانع ذهب" (Saana' dhahab), or goldsmith. If that's the case صانع means "smith, maker, or manufacturer", not gold. Since posting the message above, I've asked Jordanians, Iraqis, Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese if they know any other word for gold than "dhahab". They don't.

I know exactly what Arabs say for "hot" and "cool", slang and otherwise. In fact, I'm pretty weak at standard and Quraanic Arabic, spending most of my time communicating in a slangy dialect my wife and I call Arabic Jive.

Oh. I thought ذهب and ذهبي were pretty much the only words for gold and golden, respectively. Where did you learn Arabic?

That's not what you said.

Consider this: I am sitting about six inches from my cup of coffee. Can a line be drawn around the Earth which passes between us? Yes. An infinite number can.