A friend about to enter the USMC (Steven Eldridge) mentioned he'd been writing poetry. I got to wondering what Marine poetry would be like. This is what crawled out the shifting desert sands of my cranium.


How Do I Love You, Leatherneck?
by MSgt Elizabeth Barrett "50 Cal" Browning
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How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways.
Like a 7.62x51 NATO in the bullseye at 1,000 meters.
Like the smell of napalm in the morning.
Like the sound of a thousand drill instructors screaming so loud their lungs come out of their mouths. In unison.



Midnight Muse by GySgt
by Edgar Allen "Alpo" Poe
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Once upon a midnight hour
I came upon a lonely flower
Laying in the desert sand
A reminder from God's hand
That an enemy could be near
So I shot the flower, dear.

Birdman of Intrinsitraz

A friend at work (we'll call him Nywroc) loves to hunt. One day while we were playing darts on break and Nywroc was lamenting not getting any doves his last two or three hunts, someone came in to ask if we'd seen the mess on the window. A bird had flown into it so hard something had burst and it had left yucky stuff where it hit. Additionally, there was the vague outline of the whole bird in dust on the window. Someone had drawn an outline of a bird around it. All that was missing was police tape.

Back in the break room, Nywroc got a funny look. He started to say something, then stopped.

Me: "What?"

Nywroc: "Nothing."

Me: "No, what is it?"

Nywroc: "You'll think I'm weird."

Someone (possibly Will): "No, we won't."

Me: "We already think you're weird, so you have nothing to lose."

Nywroc: "I was thinking about getting the bird and taking it home to cook."

All of us: "What are you waiting for?"

Nywroc grinned and ran (literally) out the door. A moment later he was back. "I'll need a bag." Someone found a ZipLoc[tm], and he was off again. We watched out the window as he carried the bird over to the dumpster, stripped off the feathers and wings, and field dressed it right in the parking lot. Soon he was back upstairs with a mess in a bag. Fortunately none of the vegetarians from work were around.

The next day we asked if he ate it.

"Yup."

"How was it?"

"Good. But it was only about two bites!"