In recent months I’ve noticed my spam becom­ing increas­ingly bizarre. Some sub­ject lines are so truly absurd that I can­not imag­ine their ori­gin. Are they sim­ply really bad trans­la­tions of, say, Russ­ian or Por­tuguese? Are they ran­dom machine gen­er­a­tions meant to foil spam fil­ters? It’s a mystery.

It has, how­ever, made my daily batch of spam less of a nui­sance and more a source of amuse­ment. In a way, I feel lucky for my email address to have been cap­tured on some par­tic­u­larly strange mail­ing lists.

Some­times, a line is strangely poignant: “He worry in unabridged vol­umes.” Per­haps this unnamed pro­tag­o­nist sim­ply needs more Via­gara or a new Niger­ian Ponzi scheme in which to invest, but doesn’t it just break your heart that he wor­ries that much?

Which brings me to what may be the first in a series of found Spam Poems. I’ve started com­pil­ing these some­times gib­ber­ish, some­times evoca­tive lines into verse. Each line is a com­plete spam sub­ject line, com­pletely unedited. The only thing I’ve done is arrange them in stan­zas with an ABAB rhyming scheme.

This first poem launches with a strong dec­la­ra­tion and call to action, explores his­toric strife and exis­ten­tial­ism in the sec­ond stanza, and then looks deep into the soul’s inse­cu­ri­ties in the third. I hope you like it.

Here We Come!

here we come! stop decon­vo­lu­tion
That organ­ise go ban­tamweight
Be open he loon afflic­tion
Have buy as evaporate

Be want do holo­caust galaxy
ded­i­cated to you occi­dent inflater
My travel on min­strelsy
Which rules are in effect here? dev­il­ish calorimeter

A speak my scared fixedly
my wife oner­ous carmine
you tell do exer­cise vil­lainies
As turnon an vine

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