Ad Hominem

Ad Hominem (2000)

Yes, culture lovers, it's time again for another installment of that perversion of prosody that tests your verse fortitude and poetic backbone -- Freeper Poetry.

This mutated art form occurs when I, your humble blogger and servant, hold my nose and venture into the bowels of The Free Republic -- a dimension of no-sight and pre-verbal sounds uttered by inhabitants known as Freepers. I hunt and gather text blocks from these de-evolved beings, place them into a virtual cut-up machine, set the heart of the controls to random, and splice and dice with extreme prejudice. The result is a mash-up poem that reclaims language while turning insipid Freeper commentary in upon itself -- like a snake beginning to digest its own tail.

Today's poem is a collage harvested from comments found on

1) "Dinosaur Poop Shows Grass Is Older Than It Seems"

mixed and seasoned lightly with comments from

2) "Marquette Suspends Dental Student for Blog Comments"

Shake well -- and here's the result -- named, in keeping with today's image, after the rhetorical fallacy of attacking a speaker's character rather than his or her argument.

~/~

Ad Hominem

Dude. Be impartial -- techno and dino.
Dress like a scientist in NOW pants
and accent the meat of bloodied wingnuts
with poop. You grind on, rabid,
betting on no fossils and raptor footprints
then pretend cold theories dog you
like Five-O. You. A mad cat sweating

love and predators. A leftist action
obligates Zionist rednecks to scat shit-
faced before screaming at rocks
that think harder. Ratio of tooth to mouth
is moot. Kick thinking. Go herbivore.
That Constitutional prof pranks you like
everything. You register the wit

of a houseplant. Censors spray words
at my school. I hate their stink grass
and bells and nuke religion. The shrillest
private bags digest in labs polished
like an attorney's ass. You're goofy,
pounding blog threads without reading,
understanding nothing but a diet of pepper.

Today's Muse
[Illustration by Boris Vallejo]

...plus, let's toss in an additional image to enhance literary thematic unity and to shore up the controlling Got wood? motif:

Ad Hominem Phallacy (1987) -- woodcut by Fred Brown