Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Spam as poetry

Now that I'm at the end-stages of the home-buying process I'm being a little more cautious about deleting e-mails that once upon a time I would have automatically dismissed as spam. Whenever I get a response to an e-mail that I've sent to my lawyer's office, the subject line has usually been modified to include tags like "[Norton AntiSpam]" that suggest that my messages are being flagged as spam by their server, probably because they contain magic words like "mortgage" and "application".

Today I received a message with a subject line of "Application approval #" followed by what is probably a spammer's tracking code which I will not reprint here. The message is a jumble of semi-random words and phrases that, as others have observed before me, have a sort of poetic unity. So I've decided to reformat the message with line breaks and present it to you for your interpretation and appreciation.

Application approval #
(author unknown)
profit and johns may trail !
mulberry the cyanic or epistemology
not alfalfa not duke and balloon on pursue , cowbell !

dryad , flex a boggle may defunct in transferor

on coward or potato
not whore or rebut the audubon !

waller it ablaze or aperiodic
not catalysis a transfix but eddy but mike ,
dollar try docket it transoceanic
and
notebook in rood
not seneca or Keine
(email hier )
and deathward may tambourine it's
or greenland !

virginal it
see volumetric in decolonize some
the bilingual , chauncey or

And that's how it ends. "chauncey or?" Is that "or" as in the conjuction*, or "or" as in the term for gold used in heraldry? Is this an unfinished work? Can someone suggest the closing lines? Or does this represent a unified whole, a completeness that encompasses the incompleteness of the human condition vis a vis a universe that is at once knowable and unknowable?

*"Or" is not a preposition. Silly boy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

is it me...or is that the most confusing post you have EVER written?????

anne said...

I like the poem. It does seem a bit unfinished - kind of leaves the reader just hanging. Chauncy or...or what? But perhaps that was the writers intent. Damn those spam poets.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I left a reply to your insurance question in the comments section of my last blog entry. I guess I should have just posted it here for you. That's what I get for trying to do anything sensible before the first cup of coffee...