March 25, 2006

Connections

A friend of mine sent me the payload from a piece of spam that was rather poetic. The payload is used to confuse the non-sentient spam filters into thinking that the spam has real content. It inspired me to write the following poem. I switched my mind off and free-wrote, and then when I read it back I decided to call it Connections:

When I see you in the nighttime
I wonder how you could ever have got so beautiful.
Did you grow that way or did beauty live in you always?
And then I loose myself in a distant memory
of being the crumbs left over on the counter
when you ate that biscuit as a teenager
on the way to practice with your band
on the other side of town
in that little warehouse
where the pigeons lived in the roof.
Those pigeons,
how they loved that hair they collected
from the street after the old barber,
weary from a day of clipping and shaving,
swept it out using an old witch's broom.
He'd cut your dad's hair that day.
That cold morning of 1958,
with the ice on the streets
and the lonely old couples sitting in front of the TV
and wondering who they were going to be
the next time around.
And then I am a cork in the ocean near Hawaii
having floated from a pier in San Francisco
after being pulled from a bottle of wine
that was drunk by a couple
who had just got pregnant with your mother.
And then I am swept into the bin by your mother's hand
and your father doesn't know the warmth I feel
through my shell.
I am grateful.