SENATE UNCERTAINTY

by Chris O’Carroll

by Mike Luckovich, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In an appearance back in his home state of Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) downplayed the odds of Republicans reclaiming the Senate—and, by extension, him reclaiming the title of majority leader. In doing so, he suggested that “candidate quality” was a key factor.

“I think there’s probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate,” McConnell said, according to NBC News. “Senate races are just different—they’re statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.” —The Washington Post, August 18, 2022

Mitchity-kvetchity,

Candidate quality

Doesn’t look great for the

GOP’s brand.

Voters seem cool to those

QAnonologists

Mouthing the lies MAGA

Wingnuts demand.

Chris O’Carroll is the author of The Joke’s on Me and Abracadabratude.  His poems have also appeared in the Potcake Chapbook series, New York City Haiku, Extreme Sonnets, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, among other collections.

CRITICAL 'RITHMETIC THEORY

by Chris O’Carroll

Some schools are considering altering the way they teach math to better serve struggling K-12 students. But the debate is being sucked into the culture wars. —“Is math racist? Wrong question.” The Washington Post, December 15, 2021. See also: “Is math education racist? Debate rages over changes to how US teaches the subject.” USA Today, December 7, 2021.

The Florida Department of Education announced Friday that the state has rejected more than 50 math textbooks from next school year’s curriculum, citing references to critical race theory among reasons for the rejections. —CNN, April 17, 2022

They’ve been slipping weird racial ideas in our math!

Ron DeSantis erupts in a geyser of wrath.

When Florida’s white math books spring into action,

Black lives will be in for a touch of subtraction.

Chris O’Carroll is the author of two books of poems, The Joke’s on Me and Abracadabratude.  He is a Light magazine featured poet and a contributor to several volumes of the Potcake Chapbooks series.  His work has appeared in Extreme Sonnets, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, New York City Haiku, and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, among other collections.

OBIT OVERKILL

by Chris O’Carroll

News Site Mistakenly Publishes About 100 V.I.P. Obituaries —New York Times headline, November 17, 2020

Our Queen has died, sad British church bells toll,

Bardot, Loren, and Eastwood quit the stage,

Pelé has aimed a shot at one last goal,

And Jimmy Carter calmly acts his age.

Despite those stories, none of them were dead,

Although it’s clear now how much they’ll be missed.

For A-listers’ fake deaths, real tears got shed.

I’m Nobody. I wasn’t on the list.

Chris O’Carroll, author of The Joke’s on Me, is a Light magazine featured poet whose work has also appeared in The Asses of Parnassus, Better Than Starbucks, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, and The Spectator, among other journals, and in Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, New York City Haiku, and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE

by Chris O’Carroll

Confronted with new evidence of torture and mass hangings in one of his military prisons, Syrian President Bashar Assad said in an exclusive interview February 10, 2017 with Yahoo News that the allegations were the product of a “fake news era” and charged that a human rights group, Amnesty International, had fabricated evidence to discredit his embattled government.

Our prez now finds a brand new soulmate;
Putin’s not his only bro.
Assad, fellow fan of torture,
Learns to whine that news is faux.

Chris O’Carroll has published unfair attacks on the president in dishonest journals on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s disgusting the stuff he gets away with. 

HERE'S TO THE GREATNESS WE INAUGURATE

by Chris O'Carroll

The issues your wise tweets elucidate,
The tone you’ve done so much to elevate,
Lawsuits you’ll never settle (oh, but wait),
Women not hot enough to violate,
The torture you have pledged to reinstate,
The faith you feign but can’t quite fabricate,
The sanity you sometimes simulate –
These are the things that make our country great.

The faux respect world leaders cultivate
Now that a cartoon is a potentate,
The brownshirt crowd to which you gravitate,
The autocrats you hope to emulate,
Life-saving health care you’ll eliminate,
Your plastic swagger as you vacillate,
The bloated deity you venerate
In every mirror – these things make us great.


Chris O'Carroll has been the featured poet in Light, and has published poems in Angle, The Asses of Parnassus, The Orchards, Parody, and The Rotary Dial, among other journals.  D****d T***p has never called him "overrated."

KENTUCKY COUNTY CLERK'S MANIFESTO

by Chris O’Carroll

OWENSBORO, Ky. (AP) — A Kentucky county clerk may have again defied a federal judge's order regarding gay-marriage licenses by altering license forms to remove her name, an attorney who represents one of the clerk's employees told the judge Friday. --AP, September 18, 2015

Taxpayers pay me 80 grand a year,

And I serve all of them – unless they’re queer.

Damn all the courts that trifle with my rights

When I say no to rights for sodomites.

Unfurl the Stars & Bars!  Secede again!

No weddings for two women or two men!

My God, pro-slavery back in the day,

Now says you’re less than equal if you’re gay.

I am a champion of liberty,

But not for sinful homos, just for me

And true believers like Mike Huckabee,

Who share my righteous animosity

Against Americans who don’t agree

This nation should be a theocracy

Where the elect dress up our bigotry

In vestments of divine authority.

I flout the law because my God is great,

So great that He hates everyone I hate.

Chris O’Carroll is the featured poet in the current issue of Light.  He is anthologized in the recently published Poems for a Liminal Age and in The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, due out in early 2016.

OUTSIDE THE CAMPUS COMFORT ZONE

by Chris O’Carroll

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans. -- New York Times, 5/17/14

It should be noted that none of the schools cited in the Times article have actually implemented a policy that would mandate trigger warnings, and that college classrooms have often served as testing grounds for vital policies that might at first have seemed apocalyptic or Pollyannaish. Trigger warnings could eventually become part of academic environments, as unobtrusive and beneficial as wheelchair ramps and kosher toaster ovens. --Jay Caspian Kang, “Trigger Warnings and the Novelist’s Mind,” The New Yorker, May 22, 2014


Our syllabi have warning labels now.
We fear that certain stuff in history
And literature classrooms could somehow
Become a “trigger” for PTSD.

Slaveowners, Nazis, and the KKK --
These are a few rogues from the gallery
Of sadists calculated to dismay
Students with special sensitivity.

The cross, the rack, the bullwhip, and the stake;
Rape, warfare, genocidal tyranny --
There’s only so much college kids can take
Of painful truth about humanity.

We warn them and invite them to avert
Their eyes from education that might hurt.


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous appearances in The New Verse News, he has published poems in First Things, Folly, Measure, The Oldie, and Snakeskin, among other print and online journals, and in the anthologies The Best of the Barefoot Muse and 20 Years at the Cantab Lounge.

GREEN EGGS & MICHAEL SAM

by Chris O’Carroll

They do not like you on the right.
You get their panties bunched real tight.

They do not like you in the game,
But you got drafted all the same.

You’re gay, and hey, you’re now a Ram,
You’re NFL, you’re Sam I Am.


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous appearances in The New Verse News, he has published poems in Angle, Light, Lighten Up Online, Free Inquiry, and The Rotary Dial, among other print and online journals.

REPUBLICANS REACH OUT TO WOMEN

by Chris O'Carroll



     “And if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it, let’s take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than Democrats have made them out to be.”
     -- Mike Huckabee addressing a Republican National Committee meeting


Hey, ladies, listen up.  Mike Huckabee
Gets where you gals are at.  The GOP

Rejects those Uncle Sugar Democrats
Who want you doing it like alley cats

While taxpayers shell out for your libidos.
We live by holier free-market credos.

You do the reproductive heavy lifting,
We do your thinking for you.  We are gifting

You with a chance to raise your girlish voices
And cry, “Please, fellas, take away our choices.

Please give us more deception and distortion
Regarding contraception and abortion.

We don’t want rights.  We don’t want dignity.
Give us prescription-strength Mike Huckabee.”


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous New Verse News appearances, he has published poems in BigCityLit, the Kansas City Star, Lighten Up Online, Umbrella, and the Washington Post, among other print and online journals, and also in the anthologies The Best of the Barefoot Muse and 20 Years at the Cantab Lounge.

MAMMARY GUY

by Chris O’Carroll

Charlize Theron heard the boob.

We saw the boob.
We saw the boob.
We saw him singing on the tube.  We saw the boob.

Even guys who groove on breasts
Think that Seth’s a noxious pest.
We saw the boob.

We heard him mention many a famous nude scene,
Drooling like an adolescent twit.
His tiny mind’s a theatre with a lewd screen
On which he’s starring as a sack of rhymes with tit.

We saw the boob.
We saw the boob.

Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous appearances in New Verse News, he has published poems in Antiphon, Bumbershoot, Light Quarterly, Measure, Per Contra, and other print and online journals