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How to make a suicide bomber (Free verse) by Caducus
If I invaded your city told you how to live, who to worship spat on your brothers would you fight back? If I punished you Without proof By starving your children And shooting your people Would you accept it? If I went on television Shook the hand which strangled you The hand with a wedding ring that killed your pregnant wife would you honour her memory by doing nothing? If it were me And you destroyed my identity, Killed my brothers Criticized my God Labelled me a terrorist Decimated my way of life, Then maybe in my maddening I would strap a bomb to my chest Walk in to Starbucks And blow myself to smithereens. To be tomorrows news After the silicone model On page 4 labelled scum With no reason to say why I did it.

Up the ladder: end of the engagement
Down the ladder: Polar Bearings

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Arithmetic Mean: 5.571429
Weighted score: 5.153681
Overall Rank: 5201
Posted: March 9, 2005 2:55 AM PST; Last modified: March 9, 2005 2:55 AM PST
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Comments:
[8] Rainbow_chaser @ 70.50.62.135 | 9-Mar-05/8:34 AM | Reply
ahh the world is over runn with heartlessness, a poem that holds a fraction of events that occur daily, and then others sit by and judge without understanding.
so sad.
~Autumn
[10] zodiac @ 212.118.11.13 > Rainbow_chaser | 11-Mar-05/9:39 PM | Reply
This comment is beyond comprehensible.
[9] Dovina @ 12.72.13.229 > zodiac | 12-Mar-05/10:43 AM | Reply
Most of us would say "comprehension" in our ineptness. It's his gift to us to correct oiur grammar.
[5] nentwined @ 64.60.192.130 | 9-Mar-05/12:25 PM | Reply
A good thought. Didn't move me as poetry, though.
[10] zodiac @ 212.118.11.13 | 11-Mar-05/9:38 PM | Reply
Suppose a couple of million, say, British were somehow instantaneously teleported to Iraq and all Iraqis somehow teleported to Britain, so that the Britons suddenly find themselves occupied by an insensitive blundering foreign superpower and the Iraqis find themselves serving cranberry scones at Starbucks (this part is actually true).

Do you think the Britons would become suicide bombers?
Do you think the Iraqis wouldn't?
[n/a] Caducus @ 172.203.10.159 > zodiac | 14-Mar-05/2:28 AM | Reply
Z
no names are named or places pointed at.

Who knows what we would do until we are forced into that situation. One point that comes to mind though is look how the English dealt with the Jacobites, and how the japs in the USA were treated after pearl harbour (mostly covered up) also texans have a unique way to deal with burglars - they shoot them. All I am saying is human nature is violent once we are oppressed.

For the record - i dont condone suicide bombers, this represents the common man driven over the edge and not the extremists who do it for 'paradise'.

Thanks y'all for commenting. It was worth it to see dark angels .cameo
[n/a] -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I. @ 81.153.196.50 > Caducus | 14-Mar-05/2:52 AM | Reply
What cameo?
[10] zodiac @ 212.118.11.13 > Caducus | 14-Mar-05/9:46 PM | Reply
I'm not saying normal (ie, Western) people don't resort to violence in extreme (or even not very extreme) circumstances. Of course they do; that's not the point.

The point is, do you think modern European or American people would become suicide bombers if put into a situation like that of Iraq or Palestine (or anywhere else with suicide bombers)? Do you think the Iraqis, Palestinians, or people wherever disposed to suicide bombing, would stop being disposed to it if they were put into a situation like, I don't know, modern Chelsea?

Maybe you mean if our cities were invaded, our worship commandeered (this incidentally isn't true), etc etc etc, we'd become something like the Iraqi insurgents - not suicide bombers. This is probably the case. But personally, I don't think Americans could ever become suicide bombers under any circumstances.
[n/a] -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I. @ 81.153.196.50 | 12-Mar-05/5:54 AM | Reply
Is this poeme about Iraq, or if not exclusively about Iraq, do you think it applies to Iraq and to what is happening there?
[n/a] Caducus @ 172.203.10.159 > -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I. | 14-Mar-05/2:29 AM | Reply
see above reply to zodiac.

[9] Dovina @ 12.72.13.229 | 12-Mar-05/10:49 AM | Reply
A commentary on American policy in Iraq, and a good one. Some repetative lines, probably written in angst - "spat on your brothers" and "Killed my brothers" - "told you how to live,who to worship" and "criticized my God."

[n/a] -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I. @ 81.153.196.50 > Dovina | 14-Mar-05/4:22 AM | Reply
You dullard. If you had been following the news carefully, you'd realise that the overwhelming majority of the victims of suicide attacks in Iraq have been Iraqi civilians and Iraqi security forces, not Westerners. In Iraq, the enemy's strategy is clearly one of deliberately targeting the Iraqi people to instil fear. They want to sabotage the political process, because they know democracy will not give them the power they crave. Why? Because they represent a tiny minority of the population. Many of them are former baathists, fundamentalists who want to establish a totalitarian theocracy, and foreign scallywags like the Jordanian Zarqawi. In other words, people with a lot to lose in a free democracy, and a lot to gain from another vicious dictatorship. I won't deny some of these insurgents are ordinary young men in the wrong place at the wrong time, deluded by spiritual leaders, anti-western propaganda, and their own pride into fighting an occupation, but when they target fellow Iraqis one tends to lose sympathy.

And what are the ingredients of the average suicide bomber? Has there been a single Middle Eastern suicide bomber who wasn't utterly seeped in a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam? Or whose propaganda did not originate under a totalitarian regime? How many free democracies do you know that sponsor terrorist training camps and regularly churn out suicide bombers from among their own people? Are they motivated by an urge to combat western oppression, or do they want to spend an eternity in paradise shagging virgins? Perhaps we should capitulate to such people, or at most contain them. There's no doubt that many have died as a consequence of the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan; the real question is whether or not such a conflict was avoidable in the long term. Don't forget that people were dying there everyday, and would have continued to suffer under those regimes if we had merely contained them. And when those regimes collapsed, what then? Is the environment in a failed rogue state such that ordinary people have a decent chance of establishing a representative government, free from bloodshed? Or does power inevitably fall to the most vicious, most ruthless, most power-hungry sadist in the region? Are We back at square one, with a body count that continues to rise unbeaked?

“Democracy begins at home,” they say. And I think that's true, in the sense that the majority have to want democracy before it can work. When more than 8 million Iraqis (about 59% of the population) turned out to vote, despite consistent threats from YOUR NOBLE SUICIDE BOMBERS that they would target polling stations, I think their commitment to democracy cannot be in doubt. Would any of that have been possible without military intervention? Iraq may yet go tits-up, and there can be little doubt we've made mastakes there, but if I know one thing for sure, it's that things aren't as simple as the default "AMERICA = NAUGHTY" dumpling you so lazily embrace :(
Quite - and if you will allow me - Right.
[9] Dovina @ 12.72.10.229 > -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I. | 14-Mar-05/6:31 AM | Reply
Agreed. I don't know why you thought I thought otherwise, except of course that I'm just naturally a dullard and embrace anything bad or "AMERICA = NAUGHTY" or whatever. Go ahead, use me for your soapbox.
[n/a] -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I. @ 81.153.196.50 > Dovina | 14-Mar-05/12:52 PM | Reply
Am I going blind or something? You said this poeme was "A commentary on American policy in Iraq, and a good one." I don't think it's a good commentary on American policy in Eye-rak, for all the reasons mentioned in my thought for the day. That's why I asked Caducus if he had intended it as such. He said he hadn't mentioned any particular conflict, probably because he wanted to distance his poeme from parps that could ensue from sitting anywhere other than on the fence. He also had the common decency to comdemn suicide bombing, at least in cases where it is a product of religious zeal. The trouble is there doesn't seem to be any other kind of suicide bombing. Even kamikaze bombers were motivated by a form of imperial zeal; their reward may not have been eternal paradise, but as far as they were concerned eternal honour was pretty much the same thing. In fact, if you look carefully enough, you'll probably find that selfless individuals tend to have the courtesy not to explode themselves in crowded areas. In conclusion, the only documented case of a truly selfless suicidal attack occurs in Star Trek Generations, where Captain Kirk manages to stop Soran, but at the expense of being crushed by a bridge :(
You may not be going blind, but your wafflobritches have inflated to appalling levels.
Have they indeed? Well you're sittingonthefencebritches have become devastatingly snagged... on the fence, of all places! I take it your above holding opinions on important political matters, what?
[n/a] richa @ 81.178.193.41 > -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I. | 14-Mar-05/6:52 AM | Reply
If Iraq were a nude woman, in what position would it lie so as not to be tits-up. Does it indeed lie in that position today?
[n/a] -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I. @ 81.153.196.50 > richa | 14-Mar-05/7:10 AM | Reply
Given the very real danger of choking on her own guff, I'd recommend the recovery position. Right now, she's in the missionary position.
[3] Stephen Robins @ 213.146.148.199 | 14-Mar-05/4:02 AM | Reply
No, No, No, No, NO!

I am going to say something controversial, but what differentiates me from a suicide bomber is a Christian education and looking bulky without having to wear a belt of C4.
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