President Obama, in his time, made quite an instructive remark with regards to the recurring crises in Syria and foreign interventions,
The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way... He is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people... For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside."
Well, against this backdrop, I am asking myself- who are those really stepping aside, the power brokers way up there deciding who lives or who dies or the people whose simple lives have become mere pawns in the hands of angry demigods? This is what you tin foils contest entry is out to put in perspective.
And what better way to do that than to deploy the highly satiric form of the mock-heroic epic used in the Neoclassical period to demoralise and make parodies out of idiosyncrasies or societal misuses? But being the poet I am and considering the times we are in, I have infused this mock epic with elements of postmodernism, a near nihilism and a rap attitude.
For more exposition on how mock heroic poems work, you can check this out - Study.com.
And yes, an apology for the length, epics are classically long. This isn't even up to a fraction of what a real epic should look like.
Raps of the Lackey
Steve Argyle
Canto I
Terrible, terrible day today was,
Everyday is terrible, insane, blobbed with warts,
But today, I had it up to here,
I say, up to here - my neck, ear,
And my queasy heart.
To feel pain is pure art,
But there's only so much,
A thing like me can munch.
Now, all I want to do,
Is use the loo,
Shit the shit in me rumbling like tar,
And play some guitar,
To heal the scar that mars,
The fine features of my master, Mars.
You know him? My master?
I ain't talking about no planet that dance to the star,
I am talking about the Roman god of war,
The one that takes a tour,
Through Earth, gulps down some ale,
Before raining down on it a torrent of hail.
Believe it or not, but I serve at His table,
As a guitarist to sooth his mind that reeks of trouble.
He calls me the Forest-Nymph,
His woman, the precious Venus, calls me Slyph,
You just call me The Lackey,
Because that's my identity.
So I dedicate these rhymes from my guitar,
To my master and my homeman, Kendrick Lamar.
(I hear you gat yourself some classic plaque, the Pulitzer,).
Canto II
You want to know what pissed me off
Real good today? Well, it's the conspiracy of
The Demigods on Earth.
You think there ain't no fucking deities
Walking all over the contour of Earth with mortal homies?
Well, there are plenty of them,
But they are only known to those in the highest realm.
They put on soggy human flesh,
And take up dude names to mesh
Themselves in with the rest of humanity.
They might wear pyjamas and drink tea,
They might 'make money moves', do the political talk,
Gobble down food and fuck, fuck, fuck.
But they are the powers that be,
The ones that say, Let there be.
And there is- darkness, light or glee.
So, these dudes, come during some sky anniversary.
Mars is celebrating big, all the sky folks turning up for the party-
Mars' daughter, Harmonia; his son, Eros, nicknamed Cupid,
And then, there are these demi-dudes all garbed in suit looking stupid,
They say they are from the U.S, Europe and the Arabia,
And they want some nigger from Russia,
To give it up.
GIVE IT UPPPPPPPPPPP.
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OneHallyu
But no! Dudes like Putin hold on like it's their mother's tit.
So all the demigods go about wanting to stir a thing,
Till everyone go screaming and shouting 'Putin, put in, put it in.'
They want a war. The US don't want to carry no civil war hump,
But they want everyone blowing empty noises like a Trump.
Perez Hilton
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They talking and spitting and cussing not a little tad,
About some other demi-god named Bashar al-Assad.
I good with names, I good with numbers too,
So I hear March 2011... stop ISIL, stop Assad, shut down the zoo
Of chemical weapons and bad terrorists and bad dictatorship.
"The time has come for President Assad to step aside from the ship."
Mars, in his sprawling toga, be like
I ain't allowing no stupid war,
You don't want your neighbour,
No more in the hood? Well, you don't go sneaking up like a maze,
Or killing civilians with a deadly, lethal mace.
You buckle up your lace and tell him to his face,
We don't like how you run. We don't like your race.
But the demigods don't like to take any shitty order.
August 2013- They dig up the other deadly Nazi Enigma:
Sarin- The Nerve Gas,
And splay it all on the mass.
No one know the demigod paying
For the stuff. But we all know who is suffering,
Choking, Writhing, Foaming, Bleeding, Dying;
It's the people- the same ones they say they are trying
To build a future, a democracy for.
Shattered lives, dead bodies pour
Like debris into the mire.
But they don't stop there-
They chase hard on the heels of the Syrian Papa-Don,
Even go ahead to lick the butts of certain gnomes from Armageddon-
Rebels that drink from the same jar as Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda.
Theses terrible looking goblins with faces black as tar,
Are painted on the faces with white vanilla till they taste like honey,
And they are tinselled with helmets, white and shiny.
The demigods say on TV, They are loyal patriots, valiant volunteers
But what the hell, why do the good guys need lots and lots of dollars?
Why are too many secrets wrapped around acronyms- USAID, NATO, UK, US?
Didn't you say WH soldier, Raed Saleh, had too much blood on his hands?
Why do you trust him to wear the white hat and sooth aching children?
-These be questions whose answers no currency can buy, not even the Japanese Yen.-
Canto III
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But the sky gods are not to blame.
The demigods, no one can tame.
Mars writhes in physical agony,
The sheer sight of gaseous deaths makes him horny,
But his wife, Venus, don't give him a quickie.
She talk furious about April 7, Douma, crying Masa, widowed Amani.
And the media is taking lies for a ride in their pimped cruises.
She talk about mindless G7 propaganda spread about third world countries,
Acronyms- CNN, BBC, ABC- talk of their poverty, foreign aids and diseases,
But nobody talking about their happiness and successes."
I tell you, skibidi pap, right now, Mars's not hot himself,
He ain't got no time to think of blowjobs or sex dolls on the shelf,
He is thinking of the other gods telling him to stop the war.
Jupiter promise to hammer down on Earth with the help of Thor;
Diana cries about the mother and son with gas stored in their future.
Dionysus won't stop talking about his Iliad,
Apollos keep screamin' at the meetings,
Chlorine,
Malign,
My Daphne.
The world is falling upon Mars, bricks upon bricks,
Today, I try to cheer Mars with my home nigga's lyrics:
"...If I gotta slap a pussy-ass nigga, I'ma make it look sexy,
If I gotta go hard on a bitch, I'ma make it look sexy,
I pull up, hop out, air out, made it look sexy.
They won't take me out my element,
Nah, take me out my element."
Cartoons from the revolution.
So, if you have not already detected, I did pattern my mock heroic poem after Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock. You can check here to see what I mean. Thanks for 