Author: Oddball Magazine

Haiku
          by “Lice Brews” Ueda

The dragonfly flies,
in herky jerky movements,
seeking tiny bugs.

Haiku
          by “Lice Brews” Ueda

An ant climbs slowly
up the old man’s hairy arm,
who flings it away.

Haiku
          by “Lice Brews” Ueda

A mosquito lands
on the old man’s hairy arm.
His hand slaps it flat.

“Lice Brews” Ueda is a haikuist of insects and other tiny creatures.

~~~

Haiku
          by “Wired Clues” Abe

Along the highway,
filled with rushing trucks and cars,
grackles search for food.

“Wired Clues” Abe is a poet of technology in Japanese poetic forms.

~~~

The Writers
          by Bard Eucewelis

She kept on writing—blah, blah, blah—but what did she unlatch?
his body covered with ink blots, a mark of itch and scratch;
a mermaid sitting on a stone, a Copenhagen dream;
a song of Mozambique, Lorenço Marques, Patriquim;
sunrise, Ladakh, the LAC, along blue Pangong Lake;
what did he say—the puppeteer—he’s mad for goodness’ sake;
she dives into a writer’s soul—what’s there down deep inside?
the uP Beat author writes of healing things, a helpful guide.
One wonders what the writers will…o, what the writers will…
The World is a giant place, from Russia to Brazil.

Bard Eucewelis is…a poet. This week Chinese and Indian soldiers clashed along the northern edge of Pangong Lake. LAC stands for Line of Control.

~~~

A CMSS Cyber Attack
          by DeBuis Lawrece

The ASD concluded that CMSS attacked
the parliament and parties, back in May, when they were hacked.
The findings were kept secret, so as not to disrupt trade;
there were no comments on the violating cyber trace.
As soon as news of this was known by Aussie’s cyber clique,
lawmakers in Australia were told to change passwords quick.
Both UK and the USA were told of this back then,
nor was that all the spying China’s doing on a “friend”.
The UK sent a team to help investigate the crime,
but no one wants to talk about such sleazy Sino slime.

DeBuis Lawrece is a poet of Australia. The ASD is the Australian Signals Directorate and the CMSS is the Chinese “Ministry of State Security”—a very Orwellian name.

~~~

A Chinese Shinescape
          by Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei

Into the midst of rising tall skyscraper shoots,
he leapt—at night, a million lights, all shining bright—
high over streets filled up with cars—small stars in routes—
he soared—free from reality—a flying kite,
a vibrant light show more extr’ordinary than,
o, any he had ever seen—and up at such a height.
He whirred along above Pudong, a hard, dark man.
Where he was going to, what he was going to,
o, who could tell? that speeding Shanghai Peter Pan,
the Oriental Pearl Tower gleaming silver-blue,
Jinmao, th’ SWFC, in steel zoot suits,
the whole a flashing, crashing, smashing, splashing brew.

Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei is a poet of China. This bilding is on Shanghai, China.

~~~

A Mermaid on the Land
          by Sri Wele Cebuda

I saw her in a grove of trees upon a hard, white stone,
she sat there happily, her long, black hair cascading down,
upright and in the lotus pose in deep-pink, long-sleeved top,
her blue pants flayed, designed, arrayed, the colours brightly stopped.
Between the trunks of leafy trees, one sees sky’s azure hue.
Was she a mermaid, hidden from the World in open view?
She seems so calm and peaceful. Is there any love downwind?
Why was she holding up the book “Tattooist of Auschwitz”?
A square within a circle, or a circle round a square;
how can one fit a square peg in a round hole everywhere?

Sri Wele Cebuda is a poet of India.

~~~

Next Week’s Award at the UN
          by Ward Cubee Isle

Prime Minister Narenda Modi will be getting soon
a Global Goals Award; but not for getting to the Moon.
It is for his Swachh Bharat Mission, cleaning India,
new toilets built for millions in the rural areas.
Bill and Melinda Gates, whose money isn’t all that clean,
have raised the ire of thousands, giving something to this man;
and yet eliminating open defecation is
a worthy goal in any book, despite one’s politics.
But no one anywhere is perfect, clean, without a flaw,
especi’lly mobs of bullies who insist they are the law.

Ward Cubee Isle is a poet of awards and prizes.

~~~

The Lotus Tower
          by Esala “Cu” D’ Abrew

The Lotus Tower is above 350 meters high;
it’s visible across Colombo, rising in the sky,
like as a shiny, jeweled scepter, gleaming in the night,
the LED lights in the darkness, magical and bright.
And yet behind its beauty a two-billion rupee scam,
a company called ALIT has since scampered on the lam.
Where is that money? What was done? the President has asked,
investigations will be taking place; they have been tasked.
September 16, 2019, opening takes place;
Sinsena, in his his speech, says vanished moneys must be traced.

Esala “Cu” D’ Abrew is a poet of Sri Lanka. The tower is the tallest structure in South Asia. The invisible Chinese Company ALIT split. Even the Chinese government, who tracks all of its citizens, and many more people around the Globe, says it has no idea where ALIT was, is, or went to.

~~~

In the Dark of Night’s Black Cool
          by Cid Wa’eeb El Sur

On 9-10-2019, mighty US jets attacked
Daesh-infested Qanus Island over in Iraq.
F-15s and F-35s, along with allied jets,
dropped more than 40 tons of bombs, destroying hiding spots.
Iraqi forces then went in to clear the area;
to crush the transit hub of fighters come from Syria.
The island sits within the Tigris; it’s south of Mosul;
the fireballs exploded in the dark of night’s black cool.
Iraqi counter-terrorism troops watched from the ground,
awaiting for their chance to take back land they call their own.

Cid Wa’eeb El Sur is a poet of West Asia.

~~~

Attack at Abqaic
          by Saudi Becrewel

Though Houthis claim they were the ones that blew A-RAM-CO up;
most others think it was Iran’s work, blasting and abrupt.
The World’s largest crude-processing plant at Abqaiq,
from Ahvaz Air Base, in southwest Iran, had been attacked.
The strikes knocked out some 5% of global oil supplies.
From it, emerged, oil prices surged, a very big surprise
to buyers from Korea, China, India, Japan,
Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan.
As gas and diesel rise, so too will heating and air fares,
in this one blow, the perps gave Asian nations added cares.

Saudi Becrewel is a poet of Saudi Arabia. Oil prices went up 20% on Monday, the largest leap in nearly three decades, but are flattening out now that the Saudis say they will get Aramco up and running. Top consumer Asia looked for alternative supplies. US crude producers ramped up efforts to export crude. East-Southeast Asia is the largest oil consuming region and has the largest gap between production and consumption. The top ten crude consuming nations in the World are USA, China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Brazil, South Korea, Canada, and Germany. The attack, on condition Iran wouldn’t be caught, was approved by Khamenei.

~~~

Deep Sorrow in Monrovia
          by Lebu Seric Wade

Monrovia, the largest city in Liberia,
a population of one million in its area.
Located on Cape Mesurado and on Bushrod Isle,
its people came from North America and inland tribes.
A civil war that started back in 1990 caused
much damage to its buildings and believing in its laws.

It is a major city port in western Africa,
but crime is also rampant in most of Monrovia,
like mugging, robbing, stealing, people using, selling drugs,
corruption, bribery, assault, and rape by roving thugs.
This week some dire news occurred, a school succumbed to fire;
two teachers and more than two dozen school-age children died.

Lebu Seric Wade is a poet of West Africa. The fire took place in the suburb of Paynesville,which had the highest structure in Africa, the Omega Transmitter, until 2011, when it was demolished.

~~~

A Conversation with Rus
          by Alecsei Burdew

Heartsick, I pondered the dark mystery of life.
I wondered, o, poor people, just what do we want?
The sky is clear, and under it there is a slice
for each of us; but endlessly we fight and flaunt
our needless battles. Why? Rus interrupted me,
my reverie. He struck my shoulder, hard and gaunt.
‘What is this place’s name?’ I asked. “It’s Valerik,
translated in your language—river of the dead,’
he answered. ‘Chechnya, even now is allergic
to toleration. Our main product is hatred.’
I answered, “I admit sometimes that will suffice;
but when it doesn’t I am overwhelmed with dread.”

Alecsei Burdeew is a poet of Russia, as is Rus, i. e., Rus Ciel Badeew. This brief conversation between Alecsei and Rus, a bilding, draws on Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841). Chechnya is a federal subject of Russia in the North Caucasus.

~~~

Hey, Muses
          by Esiad L. Werecub

Hey, muses, please bring forth your arts, your songs, divine and free,
inspirers of Hesiod, bring your diversity,
and penetrate my consciousness with conversation-dreams,
like those Callimachus heard from the springs of Hippocrene,
of fated stars, roads filled with cars we humans drive upon,
escort my word through this wide World, from snow-topped Helicon,
across this turning globe, o, epochal and national,
the causes of the heavens, various and rational,
from the green woods of Washington to all around this orb,
o’er silver oceans of the Earth, to its Plutonic core,
this solid inner heart and outer liquid mantle worn,
topped off by thinnest crust, like pizza, from the oven warm,
its pieces sliced and torn for hungry stomachs dinner-borne.

Esiad L. Werecub is a poet of ancient Greece. One of the earliest Greek poets, and creator of didactic poetry, Hesiod flourished circa 700 BC, Callimachus (c. 305 BC–c. 240 BC) was a Greek Alexandrian poet.

~~~

He Never Had a Home
          by Waldi Berseuse
          “Conscripted to a military labor corps
          was lucky, for he did not die in a death camp.”
              —Béla Cedew Suri

He never had a home¬—György Ligeti—Hungarian, born in central Romania, upon May 28th in 1923, in Târnăveni in stark Transylvania, known for its scenic beauty and Count Dracula, Bram Stoker’s venture into vampire mania. In Ligeti, sound textures, as in Atmosphères, replace repeated rhythm, harmony and melody with sliding clusterings and statica, the music wrapped within the warp of sound itself, from eerie to an elsewhere comic lickety-split to escape both past and avant-garde-girt hell.

Waldi Berceuse is a poet and music critic of Central Europe. He once said of Debussey’s music—”There are too many notes”. György Ligeti (1923-2006) was a Postmodernist composer. This is a prose poem of two sentences, the first sets the composer in his milieu, the second attempts a terse verbal description of his music. Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was a Victorian novelist best known for his Gothic horror “Dracula”.

~~~

          He Saw Paris
          by Claude I. S. Weber
          “Maupassant preferred his repast on the Eiffel Tower;
          because only there could he avoid seeing it.”
              —Cews Baudeleir
          “What is love?”
              —Dieter Lünstedt and Karin Hartman-Eisenblätter

He saw the Eiffel Tower towering above the coiffeured gardens and the city boulevards, the buildings rising up around the sweep of love and light, especially at night, if you look hard. He saw the river boats go by upon the Seine, the magic of those dark realms of th’ heart and bard, the beauty that’s so difficult to hold…in vain…that flickers past you. How is ‘t possible to know? He saw the moment flashing, splashing once again, the crashing in the mind, the vast bling on the eau, spectacular, miraculous, yet also rough, th’ horr’r there behind such loveliness in vertigo.

Claude I. S. Weber is a poet of France. He once thought Paris the most beautiful city he had ever seen, and the Louvre Art Museum the most visually stimulating place he had ever been. But he also saw the underside of Paris, when he was robbed and mugged there.
Cews Baudelier is a poet of 19th century literature. This prose poem is in three sentences with a quick question. Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) was a French Realist short story writer. Cews Baudelier’s favourite Maupassant short story is “La parure” (“The Necklace”).

~~~

Lie Groups
          by Euclidrew Base

A Lie group’s a smooth manifold, like circle, line, or sphere;
its symmetries are all continuous when they appear;
but it can be more complicated, like the Lorentz group
of time-preserving linear isometries in space;
or matrices, as for example the orthogonal,
or general linear group, id est, th’ invertible.
In th’ 1890s Wilhelm Killing found the E8 group,
perhaps the Universe’s strangest and most complex shape;
it’s a 248-dimension symmetry,
and as such hard to visualize with any imagery.

Young Edmund Halley (1656-1676)
          by Euclidrew Base

Born in Shoreditch at Haggerston, the backside of Hogsdon,
he was the son of the same-named soap-boiler of London.
His dad’s apprentice taught him writing and arithmetic,
which he would use with greatest method and with finest wit.
At Paul’s school he was very perfect in celestial globes,
so much so Mr. Moxon noted misplaced stars were orbed.
He studied some geometry, at sixteen made a dial,
and then went off to Queens in Oxford studying awhile.
Well versed in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, when he was nineteen,
he solved some useful problems in his field, astronomy,
when he observed an occultation of Mars by the Moon,
which was indeed, at his young age, a marvelous, sweet boon.
At twenty, he got money to sail to Saint Helena,
to make a learnéd star-map of the Southern Hemisphere.
While on remote Saint Helena, there was so much to see,
including the first transit of the planet Mercury.
Once back, he gave his planisphere then to his majesty;
the King of England, Charles II, was well disposed and pleased.
Although he got much praise, along with regal attitudes,
he got no money for South longitudes and latitudes.

Euclidrew Base is a poet of mathematics. Norwegian Sophus Lie (1842-1899) and German Wilhelm Killing (1847-1923) were the first mathematicians to study Lie algebras. Dutch physicist Henrik Lorentz (1853-1928) won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1902 relating to the Zeeman effect; and he also set up transformation equations for Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Edmund Halley (1656-1742) was a noted Neoclassical astronomer, mathematician,and translator. It was he who urged Newton to publish his Principia. His name is associated with the comet that he correctly predicted would reappear after his death. Orbed is a neologism, meaning placed or put on an orb.

~~~

On British Neoclassicists
          by B. S. Eliud Acrewe
          “Those of us who have inherited the English language may not be in
          a position to appreciate the value of the inheritance.”
               —Chinue Achebe

I find it interesting that the Neoclassicists,
like Pope and Swift, found sustenance in Latin satirists,
and polyglot John Dryden; Milton was an afterthought.
What was it they were striving for that we have all forgot?
Sam Johnson felt that driving tide; he would not let it go;
and there were many others who were in that undertow;
yet even Byron, though he tried, could not sustain the growth
of verbal warriors in the foyer with the likes of those.
What steps could they have taken that could carry us aloft?
instead that left us hopelessly too oft both lost and soft.

B. S. Eliud Acrewe is a poet and literary critic of British literature. Eliud was a legendary king of the Britons, preceded by Urianus and succeeded by Cledaucus according to Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1095–c. 1155). Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) was a Nigerian poet and novelist, John Milton (1608-1674), John Dryden (1631-1700), Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), and George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) were notable poets, from the Baroque to the Romantic eras.

~~~

The Wind Turbines
          by Eber L. Aucsidew

Between 300 and 600 feet wind turbines rise,
with blades more than 100 feet in length. It is the size
that blows me, o, away, when I am driving past them there
up towering and turning round, o, in the open air.
No Don Quixote could attack this new technology,
with spear in hand, this windy land producing energy.

They are so huge, one feels one’s in the presence of great gods,
a metal forest managed by a high-tech Aeolus.
Enchanted blades, some hovering beside the highway’s edge,
their whirring, whooshing, yearly causing thousands of bird deaths.
So graceful in the distance, their propellers whirl about,
enchanted, heavy, huge, butt-ugly, concrete-based, and loud.

Eber L. Aucsidew is a poet of air and water. Eber L. Aucsidew’s favourite character of Spanish literature is Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

~~~

In the Waiting Room
          by Bruc “Diesel” Awe

He sat there in the waiting room more than five hours long.
It was the 90,000-mile check he waited on.
Clad in a light-blue tee, he climbed upon a cushioned chair
and waited for th’ inspector’s care, his head up in the air.
He patiently remained in that position for some time
for front brake job and rear brake job and balancing of tires.
Th’ air filter was replaced, the drive-shaft bolt was, yes, retorqued.
It seems there wasn’t much that wasn’t looked at or uncorked.
Of course, then came the bill, more than a thousand-dollar hit;
but, o, he was so glad that it was done and he could git.

Automobile Safety Features
          by Bruc “Diesel” Awe

A sharp turn to the future—new-car features, edgy things,
like safety packages that give the passengers realings.
There’s pre-collision systems with pedestrian de-tects—
a camera and radar watch for people and ob-jécts;
a lane-depart alert with steer-assist, when going fast,
will check the road around the vehicle, as one goes past;
the automatic high-beams are designed for one at night,
the auto-activate both high and low, the proper light;
and then there’s full-speed range-dynamic radar cruise control,
which helps maintain a preset distance from cars on the road.

Bruc “Diesel” Awe is a poet of transportation. Accoring to Beau Lecsi Werd, “realings” is a neologism which stands in contrast to imaginings. The International Motor Show, the World’s largest, held in Frankfurt this year. from 12 September to 22 September, though showing autos of the future, including more technology and electric cars, it was trimmed down from last year and was protested by approximately 20,000.

~~~

The Captain of the Yacht
          by Sub Cie Leeward

Aboard his yacht, the captain set the speed to forty knots;
behind the white-blue pancake-flat wake, looked like parking lots.
The sunset, in the distant skies, rose high before his eyes,
pink ribboned, golden threads, and azure, stretching out and wide.
The large, glass windows made it seem like nature was right there,
because it was; below, reflecting water everywhere.
Such luxury and opulence, so shiny, sleek and smooth,
he felt as if somehow he had arrived right at the truth.
The form and function of machinery and engine room
made him believe that it was time to take it for a z-o-o-o-o-o-m.

Sub Cie Leeward is a poet of boating and shipping. His favourite sea poem is “Sea Fever” by John Masefield.

~~~

Politics
          by Brice U. Lawseed

My left is strong and vigourous,
my right is firm and rigourous,
together they can work
together as a well-wrought team.

I like it when they are well-oiled,
moving smoothly, tough, hard-boiled,
toiling for the common good,
toiling as a lawman should.

The New York Times
          by Brice U. Lawseed
          “Democracy dies in the dark.”
              —Damon Keith (1922-2019)

You see it happening—debasement—right before your eyes,
degeneration escalating at the New York Times.
You think you only can observe such things in history;
but there it is, right now, right here; it is no mystery.
A paper once reporting facts and thé noteworthy news
has now become an advocate of only one side’s truths.
But truth is larger than two sides, it has many parts;
the New York Times is dropping fast into a pool of tar,
like ancient tar-pit death-traps, catching how corrupt it is
for future minds to see a mindless group of journalists.

Brice U. Lawseed is a poet of ideal politics and Washington DC. His wicked cousin is Caud Sewer Bile, who considers politics benighted, Washington DC, a swamp, and journalism, advocacy propaganda.

~~~

A PostPersius Posy for New Millennium Poesy
          by Wic E. Ruse Blade

American youngbloods have had their wine, and dined as well;
and now they are prepared to seek the poetry of hell.
And straight away they speak in verses in their holy jeans;
at slams they lisp their numbers, out of order, in their means.
They mince, they wince, they prance, they dance, they scream their
          thoughtfree dreams,
depressing wrestling with their demons and prosaic schemes.
The thunderous applause proves that the poet is not dead.
The hour’s happy. With another, it goes to the head.
The marble tomb awaits its singers. Bring the ashes in.
What blooms will rise upon such eyes? What gloomy-roomed chagrin?

Wic E. Ruse Blade is a pompous ass fond of fondling, Latin Lit and goofballs likewise.