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Showing posts with label Elvira the city chicken. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elvira the city chicken. Show all posts

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Missionlocal.org Has the Heart of an Out-of-Town Chicken

Missionlocal.org Has the Heart of an Out-of-Town Chicken

I posted Manifesto of a Militant Vegan Bio-Engineer yesterday on http://missionlocal.org after first reading a link on sfgate. I did so because, 1) The article didn't ask the most interesting question. 2) They're 'mission locals' right? So in theory, they should be supportive of truly local activities, like poetry, right? Of course they aren't.

I'm so silly—what was I thinking? Website comments are supposed to be vapid and always supportive. Here is their comment policy/mission-statement: “You are free to make a comment, but do not make a dangerous comment. Do not question why we feel the need to write about people who want to rescue everything. Do not mock eating! It's what we do in the Mission! We moved to town to eat this city up and shit our hipster good-taste all over you yokels! If your verse was truly local, we would have found it!”

This is an anecdote about the power of words. If comments were so meaningless, mission-so-called-local wouldn't have put the option on their site. They wouldn't moderate the comments to permit cloying posts like this: "This is so sweet!!! Thank U and bless those people with love and tender heart to other creatures..." because such comments themselves are essentially meaningless beyond sentiment. Most webmasters censor to manage their 'brand' in the name of 'signal-noise' ratios, but there are no signal-noise ratio issues on their site worth managing. My verse had no profanity, it was relevant to the topic, it was well cited; so I conclude they belong in the coop along with the other chickens in this story. They fear the poem outdoes their story and they are correct. And this fear is a scarlet letter: 'C' and it belongs left of center, on their chests.

ps: It's interesting to note that sfgate, for all its problems (censorship and otherwise), still let me post the poem on their site. Evil Hearst is more local than missionlocals? Noooooooooooo!

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Saturday, April 17, 2010

Manifesto of a Militant Vegan Bio-Engineer [Today's News Poem (Sonnet), April 17, 2010]

Manifesto of a Militant Vegan Bio-Engineer [Today's News Poem, April 17, 2010]
“Pet activists from Austin to Corpus Christi and Victoria launched recently an emotion-charged campaign. They bombarded local politicians, animal shelter leaders, the newspaper and others with calls to ban the gassing of unwanted pets.”
– GABE SEMENZA, Victoria Advocate, April 17, 2010 at 2:15 p.m.
http://www.victoriaadvocate.com/news/2010/apr/17/gs_pet_campaign_041810_92438/?news&local-news
“Hundreds of dead animals have been found at a home in Marion County and another 400 live animals have been rescued”
– Victoria Benchimol, ABC Action News 1:32 pm April 17, 2010
http://www.abcactionnews.com/content/news/local/story/Hundreds-of-dead-animals-found-in-Marion-County/DKGb4SyxzE2NU7xzNszIug.cspx

http://missionlocal.org/2010/04/elvira-the-city-chicken

Perpetual, the holocaust consumes
The lives of zebrafish, of cats in labs!
The monster made of claw and teeth assumes
That tender tendons, hair and muscle-slabs
Enjoy the murder. Meat is murderous:
The eating—true—but flesh will kill in kind.
Since eating's cycle's just too barbarous—
Because we love all life, we'll have to find
A way to replicate the paragons
Of living with sustainability:
The trees and other plants that drink the dawn
And photosynthesize with no hostility.
To always mate (like trees): what joy we'd bring!
To worship fire, first burn-up everything.

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