The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

As anyone who knows me could tell, I love satire. I enjoy reading it, writing it, viewing it, etc. From The Daily Show to Saturday Night Live to The Colbert Report to written works by Al Franken and beyond, I love satire. Likewise, there have been several articles on the site The Onion that have made me laugh quite hysterically. I've had to laugh even harder when a story gets reported of a politician believing an Onion article as being real. However, having said all that, I can't for the life of me find anything amusing about the now very well-known and controversial tweet made by The Onion last night during the Oscars. Quvenzhane Wallis, the 9-year old actress who was on hand at the Oscars last night, as she was nominated for Best Actress in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild , was the subject of this very tweet. The tweet read, "Everyone seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhane Wallis is kind of a c**t, right?" How is that funny exactly? How is that su...

This poem can be found on pages 17-18 of my book, "Seasons Come, People Grow: A Poetic Journey". The beat and rhythm, Shades and touch, The rhymes and flow, The big red splotch, Beautiful on the eyes, Coherent or not, Beautiful to the heart, Emotionally affecting, The blind man on the piano, The deaf woman singing solo, The armless individual painting a picture, The child in a wheelchair writing a best seller, Ever expanding, Infinite possibilities, The mind, heart and soul in unison, Forming a beauteous equation, No rules can be written, There is no right or wrong, No limitations can be made, No boundaries in art.

What I love about art (the arts) more than anything is the fact that it holds no particular rules or boundaries. I even wrote a poem about this a while back, entitled, "No Rules." If you try to change the rules in math and decide that 2 + 2 = 7, sure, in your new world of math, that may be correct, but the teacher won't mark it down that way. If you decide that your boss's layout for a project isn't quality enough, so you decide to change things here and there, you might as well go looking for a new job. If you want to see a movie, but don't want to pay for it, unless you have connections, then good luck. If you decide to go 100 in a 55, expect to get pulled over for doing 45 over the speed limit. Everywhere else in life, there are non-stop rules, boundaries and guidelines enforced on us. At work, school, at theaters, concerts, bars, in relationships, with the family, parenting, driving, but not in art. While there is a certain formula used in all ot...