What the Zuck Did he Say?
          by Eric Awesud Ble

On Sugar Mountain, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg
has testified before the scrutinizing Senators.
To questions he was asked, he worked to make his words seem true,
“I want to have my team…” “I’ll have my team get back to you.”
“I do not know.” “No, I don’t know” “Uh, I can certainly…”
“I’m not familiar with those pieces of…specific’lly.”
“If you would like.” “I’m happy to.” “No, I have not heard that.”
“I’m not sure.” “I want to make sure I get this accurate.”
“I’m not sure of the answer.” “It sounds difficult to me.”
“I’m not specific’lly aware.” “I don’t know.” “…certainly…”
“I don’t know when we changed it.” “We can follow up on that.”
“I do not know.” My team will…” “…flush out the details of…” What?

Eric Awesud Ble is a poet of Orwellian dimensions who does not “hate speech.”

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Trolling Trolls
          by Uclis Weebeard
          for Jem al-Seas

Among these Oceal Just-Us warriors of Dark Sauron are
the Trolls who love the Necromancer, for his love of war.
The only greater in their minds, as they attack the right,
is Melkor, he, their lord who turned away from light to night.
Named Morgoth, when he had destroyed Two Trees of Valinor,
and murdered Finwë, Noldor’s King, whose son was Fëanor,
this Tyrant, Enemy, Oppressor of the World—Bauglir—
is he who rose in might and fright, the god of hate and fear.
And though his sad disharmonies assault the good and true,
they can’t supplant the beauties of the music of Eru.

Uclis Weebeard is a poet of J. R. R. Troll King and his World!

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Prime-Number Quest
          by Euclidrew Base

Prime numbers are those measured by their unity alone,
and proven infinite by Euclid many years ago.
His fellow Alexandrian, Greek Eratothenes,
showed how to find prime numbers in his algorithmic sieve.
With just 168 refined, known steps of filtering,
one can discover all primes to 1,000,000 — ah, ka-ching.
With work by Pell, and later Hindenburg, and Kulik too,
more primes were being visited and coming into view.
Gauss started studying amounts between the chiliads,
with numbers greater than deaths in a dozen Iliads;
and when he noticed primes became less frequent as he went,
according to an inverse-log law, he logged his contént.
Vallée Poussin and Hadamard, in 1896,
showed π(x) ~ x /log x;
and using Riemann’s zeta function in their mental chains,
saw percent error reaching zero with a larger range.
Now here in 2018, number theorists still seek
prime-number answers to their quest for universal keys.

Euclidrew Base is a poet of mathematics. Line 14, in the above poem, is pronounced “showed π of x approaches x divided by log x.”

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Am-air-ica
          by Eber L. Aucsidew

Die Welt proclaimed the biggest drop in CO2 was in
America, in the first year of Donald Trump—no spin.
Though worldwide emissions grew by 1.4 percent,
they fell in UK, Mexico, Japan, and the US.
The IEA released its data on March 22,
comparing all the 2017 results in view.
The biggest drop came from the US—down .5 percent.
Die Welt proclaimed the World’s best protector was the Prez.
While China jumped a full percent, and others did so too,
the skies are cleaner in America, and often blue.

Eber L. Aucsidew is a poet of air and water. He appreciates the Milesians Thales and Anaximenes.

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Once Below a Time
          by Uclis Weebeard

The offspring of Magog and Gog, the awfing El Ogog,
has grown into a mighty Ogre in the Land of Blog.
A one-eyed god-Cyclopean, he only can do wrong.
He terrorizes villages with Censor Ring and Song.
His Counselor, the Vil Vizier, advised him to lie low,
and hide his felonies beneath the Mountains of High Snow,
where he can eat his cheeselogs and his watermelon balls
in Dark Chateau near Xelograd within its alcoved halls.
He only speaks with forkèd tongue, like Elo Cwence the Snake.
Like Grendelo, he hates all those who like to feel okay.
His enemies, like Héloïse, nominatissima,
and Angel Ou, who dwells beyond the Hills of Yemi Ma,
are lovely singers in the Band Bard Eucewelis Choir,
electrical light orchestra with Educable Wires.
He persecutes those who do right, and relocates their homes
beyond the Fields of Blessedness and Valley of the Gnomes.
His evil eye goes ev’rywhere. Beware of him, my friend.
Watch out for all his vile ways, for he will do you in.
Remember there is more to life than messages you read
between the members of his armies in the Realms of Greed.

Uclis Weebeard is a poet of realistic phantasy and fantastic reality.

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Oceal Poetry
          by We Be De Cur Is Al

As wave on wave of spume-spun spam crash-splashes on my shore,
I wonder who or what or when or how or why I’m bor…n…e…
O, Borneo! Varuna, god of water and the rain!
the Ocean thrashes all of us who dare to live again.
Amen—wangmin—We netizens—across the Internet,
are international and smashing, digital, widespread.
Like mushrooms, no one sees us, nudgers, shovers, meek and mild.
By morning we’ll inherit Earth; by noon we will be filed.
In this the New Millennium, we’re mixing in the blogs.
We chat like mad cicadas hidden in forbidden rocks.

We Be De Cur Is Al is a mercurial poet and acquaintance of Esca Webuilder.

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The Wind-chewed, Binzhou Statue, April 6, 2018
          by Li “Web Crease” Du

A giant statue of “First Emperor of China” crashed.
Winds hit Shandong; down went the over-sixty-foot bronze cast.
Blown from its pedestal, the terracotta Qin Shi Huang
was flattened, like a pancake, chronicled state medi-yawn.
It landed face first on the concrete, gray before its rise,
beneath the paler, fainter, gray-white, early April skies.
The six-ton statue of the warrior king needed some umph;
immediately workers brought their cranes to lift it up.
The toppled Binzhou statue showed it was a hollow form
supported by a metal framework, opened in the storm.

Li “Web Crease” Du is a poet of China. Tourists like to go to the resting place of both Mao Zedong @ Tiananmen and Qin Shi Huang. Historian Sima Quan said of him, he had a puffed-out chest, like a hawk, a voice, like a jackal, with a heart, like a wolf. He enslaved and castrated citizens of neighbouring states. He advocated the burning of the books. Mao once said of him, “He buried 460 scholars alive—we have buried 46,000 scholars alive.” The present-day Emperor of China, Xi Jinping, sits at their feet.

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Ah, Keats
          by Basil Drew Eceu
          for David Gosselin

Ah, Keats, especi’lly in his odes. But for his practice, I
would not have written as I have. His sighs, his furtive eye,
his flights of fancy through the sky of life’s experience,
his sentience and his sense, his sensual sapped sapience,
all brought me to the music of his groaning artistry;
it is like looking on a pageant in a tapestry.
Throughout, his diction, precious jewels shine—ra-di-ant-ly.
His work is like a treasure chest that’s laden with pure glee,
when even melancholy came to gaze upon his quest,
adventurous or dangerous, romantic or beau geste.

Basil Drew Eceu is a poet of 19th century England, Romantics and Victorians.

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I Caught a Glimpse
          by Usa W. Celebride

I didn’t see him—Jeffers on his tower—like a ghost,
in overly dramatic prance, a grand Whit-manic boast,
with as much spirit as the father of Prince Hamlet’s brain,
collapsing on the California coast, a dodgy Dane,
nor White Cliffs hovering above Matt Arnold’s Dover Beach;
this pause on the Pacific out of Sophoclean reach,
or Aeschylus upon the escalator coming down
to see the continental shelf come crashing underground;
I saw another bloated figure, windier than Troy,
come riding on the foamy waves along with Sigmund Freud.

 

Metafictionist Barthelme
          by Usa W. Celebride

Like Pynchon, Barth, and Vonnegut, Postmodern Barthelme
wrote fragmentary tales in dadaesque-like entropy.
Ashbury-esque he played around life in his jazzy scrawl,
repetitive, hypnotic, parataxic, and banal.
Like other members of his age, he made a lot of noise.
He was a Texan Beckett with a Kafka jackdaw voice.
Disoriented, double-minded, futile and bizarre,
his high-degreed impersonality sat at the bar
of cultural debris, and drank his whiskey from a glass,
pontificating, like a Don Quixote on his ass.

Usa W. Celebride is a poet of American literature.

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Robert Birkhofer
          by Seer Ablicudew

I saw him on the mountain slope above the winding road.
He had bright-blue striped sleeves upon his black, wind-breaking coat.
He wore blue-tinted shades upon his balding oval head,
but what he saw I could not tell—the living or the dead.
He had a toothy smile, like an eagle holding back
from flying off its awesome perch, a hard, white, stony crag.
Above him white clouds stretched out far across the azure sky;
below him snowy mountain paths took off before the eye.
He was divining something in his mind; I could not tell.
The sun was shining blindingly, an ordinary spell.

His mind was on a Fleet of Worlds, moving through spacetime,
as if raised in the jungles of Ylesian sublime,
as if he came of age upon the streets with Camorr’s brutes,
as if he studied at Mahoutakoro and St. Jude’s.
He stared in wonder, as if daylight kissed drab Hornberg’s walls
and lent its hope to weary souls within its dreary halls.
Was this the Nentir Vale? Was he in pursuit of coins?
How could he find himself between the ribs and tenderloins?
Did he think love could keep a boat up in an open sky,
when all it wants to do is fall out of the closing eye?
Where was his bastion sitting at the edge of desert sands?
Was he a mad man with a cat of infinite demands?
Did he shed tears of bitterness on beaches of Virmir?
or ride the warship Rocinante, that mad puppeteer?

Seer Ablicudew is a poet of prophesy and a prophet of poesy.

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The Texas Star
          by “Wild” E. S. Bucaree

The Texas Star, the Ferris wheel, in Dallas at Fair Park,
is lit in energy-efficient LED at dark.
About 340 tons, it circles up above the oaks;
some nights one sees the full moon thread its way through turning spokes.
With forty-four gondolas, over 60 meters high,
it carries up 264 or less into the sky.
It offers up a bird’s eye view, each fall it goes around,
and turns through autumn’s warm, fresh air, upon Earth’s turning ground.
Beyond, the jets fly overhead, some way high up above,
and some about to land at DFW and Love.

“Wild” E. S. Bucaree is a poet of Texas.

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Out of That Thatched Cottage Door
          by Bard Eucewelis

It was as if he had come out of that thatched cottage door,
the brown and wooden one within the place that he adored,
the bright, exterior white walls that glistened in the sun,
beside the red-combed rooster, flush blue tail, feathered dun,
and lovely hens, in search for food, among the gray walkways,
between the rain and flowers flourishing on sunny days.
He stepped beyond the great gray rocks that shimmered in the light,
as if he were upon the verge of something good and right,
a lovely woman waiting for him, sitting in a swing,
the possibility of marrying, a silver ring.

Bard Eucewelis is a poet of the Celtic Sunshine, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Bretons, the Irish, the Scots, and the Manx.