Saturday 13 June 2009

Nopal mix fully chalk?

I don't normally commend spam, but I just love the strange filler text in a Viagra spam that arrived this morning. I don't know how it was generated, but it seems not quite random in its tendency to alliteration and its bizarre flight of imagery, so that it comes across as a surreal poem.

nopal mix fully chalk?
fetid bay coatee.
moving ingle pawn.
pray valuer aerate chose.
peso attic.
public morgue nopal.
ape chalk large.
novel chump penes mix!
lumper sin potion chalk.
hubby warble palmy bingo?
thyme coatee peso.
feed bled lipped fiber.
tempi elan palmy find!
ladder keeker thyme moving.
how zoic find seer!
gasper module nopal pupa?
feed warble.
potboy emir palmy.
farad potboy flake potion?
find gooey.
lumper brazil tandem.
emir pupa voter moving!
luting estop cooker.
gypsa chalk chalk pawn!

I see others have a similar reaction: see Ode to the SpamBots and Poetry from today's batch of spam mail. These all put me in mind of Dylan Thomas's How soon the servant sun:

How soon the servant sun,
(Sir morrow mark),
Can time unriddle, and the cupboard stone,
(Fog has a bone
He'll trumpet into meat),
Unshelve that all my gristles have a gown
And the naked egg stand straight,

Sir morrow at his sponge,
(The wound records),
The nurse of giants by the cut sea basin,
(Fog by his spring
Soakes up the sewing tides),
Tells you and you, my masters, as his strange
Man morrow blows through food.

All nerves to serve the sun,
The rite of light,
A claw I question from the mouse's bone,
The long-tailed stone
Trap I with coil and sheet,
Let the soil squeal I am the biting man
And the velvet dread inch out.

How soon my level, lord,
(Sir morrow stamps
Two heels of water on the floor of seed),
Shall raise a lamp
Or spirit up a cloud,
Erect a walking centre in the shroud,
Invisible on the stump

A leg as long as trees,
This inward sir,
Mister and master, darkness for his eyes,
The womb-eyed, cries,
And all sweet hell, deaf as an hour's ear,
Blasts back the trumpet voice.

- Ray

2 comments:

  1. Raises interesting questions about the fundamental nature of poetic structures.

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  2. In this case, it's the line structure, and what seems like rather less than random word choice: they do seem chosen for, as I said, alliteration; and the vocabulary is all rather vivid and distinctive.

    ReplyDelete