SPAM poems

As the heading suggests, these poems all feature titles that were genuine spam subject lines. I was particularly enamoured of the ones consisting of seemingly random words, and did my best to create an order from the verbal chaos. "novitiate seedbed," in the Lives of the Saints entry, was one of this series.

skyscraper waif towards zero

In the long shadow of the Sears Tower
she lives on Gauloises stolen from down
the block, slipped beneath the plaid coat
with the rabbit-fur collar the Salvation
Army gave her outright when she cried.
It’s very cold. She smokes; she shivers.
She can’t get close to the tower anymore,
so in its long shadow she lives on Gauloises,
grinding her Zippo against the cold.

marrow radical trouser simplistic

Je suis un sans-culottes enragé à l’os!
thinks the pissed-off tradesman in trousers.
He’s got three tons of corn creaking his
fifth-floor bedroom, a stash of squash in
the fireplace, a sheep with its head in his lap.
He killed a dozen priests last fall, giving them
good, red French collars; no man, he thinks,
should by judged by the cut of his pants,
though those Papists wear dresses. He spits
between mutton and marrow. In his bones
he know his head, too, will roll. Better then
to start the casserole toute de suite.

[This may make more sense if you read up on the sans-culottes. Try http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255/la/sans-culottes.html]

cough syrup 369 dilettantes

But I, the 370th, am a cough syrup connoisseur,
having been cursed with recurrent catarrh from
childhood. The grape-flavor-flavored stuff
is weak and watery, and requires a double dose
to operate at all. The red, while effective,
pierces my tongue with weed killer and half-
dissolved aspirin. The best—my mouth waters—
is the slow yellow suspension, flavored with
a memory of melted banana. It goes down like
puddin’. I snuggle up to the codeine like a kitten.
Every movement is falling into angora and tongues.

steradian pasadena complicity

A steradian is a measurement of a solid angle,
so if you were to go to the confluence of highways
605 and 210 and stand or lean forward or do
parvnakonasana (side-angle pose) you’d be in
steradians’ purview. Take any walk anywhere,
in fact, and the measurement follows you,
whether you’ve got a protractor or not. Isn’t it odd,
though, that we maintain Newtonian spaces
though our top scientists know different? As if
Prozac had been invented but most people still
drilled holes in skulls. Just pretend, logic whispers,
it’s insignificant. But I know from my walks
that everything is important, as I scan the ground:
dropped jewelry, portentous playing cards, shards
of pottery, coins identifiable only by size, feathers
and pine cones, and once an stuffed Easter bunny
smiling into a puddle in the middle of the street.

augean Ci@lis

The dirtiest one yet.