Monday, October 15, 2007

Spam as refrigerator magnet poetry

I'm sure many of you are familiar with Patton Oswalt's bit "The Poetry of Pornography". I received a spam e-mail at an old Yahoo account of mine which I barely use anymore and while it's certainly less filthy than the spam Oswalt describes, I'm pretty sure I could read this at an open mic and someone would be moved.

The subject of this e-mail was:

shops, surrounded

Written exactly like that, all lowercase, ee cummings-style. Understated yet evocative.

The first line in the body is:

Head First Design Patterns

Which has nothing to do with anything that follows but who said poetry has to follow a narrative?

It's followed by (e-mail censored by me):

Hi. How is the day going? Email me at xxxx@xxxxxx.xxxx only. I am
good looking female. Don't miss some of my naughty pictures.


Pretty standard stuff, though the broken english gives it a nice flavor. (Or flavour.)

The final sentence is the real mind blower though:

kids: The American render you any further services. about creating
"super children" contribute to you would be


Wow. That is some pretty dazzling free verse. Who is The American? What services is he or she rendering? Is the service creating these "super children?" What are they contributing? Is it a commentary on the war? Are the "super children" out young men and women dying in Iraq and elsewhere?

Let's run this together excluding the obviously promotional line:

shops, surrounded
Head First Design Patterns
kids: The American
render you any further services.
about creating "super children"
contribute to you would be


Not bad. Anyone want to turn this into an exquisite corpse? Feel free to leave further additions in the comments section. If they come from spam you've received, even better.

1 comment:

  1. To survive in the financial
    The child who is meek,
    or scrawny,
    or just plain bashful
    It was this bet,
    this single act of placing $10 billion
    on the fact that he became talkative,
    making public
    declarations
    about what all at once lost
    faith
    in the willingness of Western European governments

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