Almostgotit.com

Naturally I only discover an idea after several others have already picked it up and run far, far away with it.

Kristin writes poetry using only the subject lines from the hundreds of pieces of spam she receives. Here’s her most recent endeavor:

I didn’t want to hurt your feelings

cheryl didn’t want you to know
your breath needs help
your weight is a problem
you aren’t what employers are looking for
nobody wants to hurt your feelings
you should ask yourself
why does anyone care about you?
Speaking of gouging my eyes out….
a personal letter from santa
writ large
let me tell your wife
you hate to be wrong.

Then there’s Morton, who’s created a whole Anthology of Spam Poetry blog, and pairs his poetry with vignettes of the folks who — probably — wrote it.

Now What?

My friend, you are in trouble
I don’t think you know about this
We have bad news for you
Your credit card was removed
Your account has been limited
You have feelings of guilt and embarrassment
Your VISA is fraudulent and it will be suspended
Your order status: passion wasted
- Grover Ramos

When Mr. Ramos was five, his family packed everything they could carry and walked, rode buses and crawled their way from Columbia to cross over into the United States. They constantly crisscrossed the country seeking work on various farms and small factories, which has left Mr. Ramos to believe that he has seen and learned more about the United States than many natural born US citizens. His poem “Now What?” is characteristic of his work which tends to reflect on the cross modern dilemmas of the hyphenated American.

Of course, another reason to keep blogging is all the great spam you start getting after a while.

I don’t just mean the sex ones, though there is that. Here are some of my more printable favorites:

How do you do…
The Regard! The Excellent forum! Thank you!
There was merrily!
This simple prodigy!
All the best!

They came and found music, and dancing! There was exceeding brilliance, and also (most likely) Haiku! How much more complimentary could they be?

Hi all!
Excellent forum, added to favorites!
I simply mad about this forum!
The Good lad an author! I much like site!

And I simply mad about such enthusiasm, and hardly even feel it necessary to correct a little gender confusion. Good lad it is.

One time, I got several in a row like this one, and I would give up half the dictionaries in my house just to receive another:

orange-winged parcel-gilt midden mavis nitrogen cycle meter fixer openside planer palm fern oat grinder pea green opera cloak mining claim mole catcher muck rolls paper-baling Oceanic mongol Pan-saxon one-act mullein pink opium-drowsed mild-savored nitro-hydro-carbon oil beetle mint camphor opening bit passage hawk Pagano-christian officer plant Pan-turanism night-overtaken noble-natured Olive oil castile soap one-pounder narrow-shouldered moss-brown non-recoiling Non-syrian Mid-asian parish school muskus grass oyster plover ninth-known pack twine nimble-mouthed oyster tree party-zealous Monroe doctrine now-being opium drinker palm beetle open-caisson moon-struck Non-sanskritic orange peel oil-yielding naked-eyed mighty-brained mid-aged murexide reaction palate bone pack road paper-selling mid-refrain much-devouring Old bactrian oat bread mutton cane ostensible partner oil cup mud-color never-say-die olive-shadowed out-of-town mouth footed olive gnat nail bone mezzamine floor

Ah, just read it and weep.

I’m nobody! Who are you?

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Photos by Almostgotit

Poem by Emily Dickinson

Sometimes when you ask for poetry, you get poetry.   But a lot of people are very bad at following directions.  I find this a great relief, actually:  It’s good to know I’m not alone!

From Gina (before getting to know this woman, one ought to invest in a super-sized package of Depends..) (& that’s probably a joke that only a mother would understand…)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhcA4Ry65FU]

From my dearest Susie:

If you’ve read the Give a Mouse a Cookie series, you will think  this is familiar…

IF YOU GIVE A MOM A MUFFIN
If you give a Mom a muffin,
She’ll want a strong cup of coffee to go with it.
She’ll make herself some.
Her three year old will spill the coffee.
She’ll wipe it up.
Wiping the floor, she’ll find dirty socks.
She’ll remember she has to do laundry.
When she puts the laundry in the washer, she’ll trip
over boots and
bump
into the box of Goodwill items.
Bumping into the Goodwill items will remind her she
has to get these
boxes
in the car and out of her basement.
When she puts the boxes in the car, she’ll find a bag
of groceries and
this
will remind her she has to cook dinner.
She will get out the chicken defrosting in the fridge.
She’ll look for her cookbook (101 Things To Do With
Chicken).
The cookbook will be sitting under a pile of mail.
She will see the Netflix movie she’s meant to mail and
the preschool
bill,
which is due tomorrow.
She will look for her checkbook.
The checkbook will be in her purse that is being
dumped out by her one
year
old.
She’ll smell something funny.
She’ll change the baby’s diaper.

As she finishes up, she’ll realize she brought the
hand sanitizer down
to
the kitchen.
While she is throwing away the diaper and searching
for the hand
sanitizer,
the phone will ring.
Her three year old will answer and hang up.
She’ll remember she wants to phone a friend not for
coffee but a very
strong drink.
Thinking of drinking will remind her that she was
going to have a
cup of coffee in order to stay awake for the rest of
the day.
And chances are…

If she finds her cup of coffee (which she has to
reheat by now),

Her kids will have eaten the muffin that went with it.

From Mindy, a woman always full of surprises:

So, we had this great 10 year old cat named Jack who just recently died.  Jack was a great cat and the kids would carry him around and sit on him and nothing ever bothered him.  He used to hang out and nap all day long on this mat in our bathroom.

Well, we have 3 kids and at the time of this story they were 4 years old, 3 years old and 1 year old.  The middle one is Eli.  Eli really loves chapstick.  LOVES IT.  He kept asking to use my chapstick and then losing it.  So finally one day I showed him where in the bathroom I keep my chapstick and how he could use it whenever he wanted to but he needed to put it right back in the drawer when he was done.

Last year on Mother’s Day, we were having the typical rush around and try to get ready for Church with everyone crying and carrying on.  My two boys are fighting over the toy in the cereal box.  I am trying to nurse my little one at the same time I am putting on my make-up.  Everything is a mess and everyone has long forgotten that this is a wonderful day to honor me and the amazing job that is motherhood.

We finally have the older one and the baby loaded in the car and I am looking for Eli.  I have searched everywhere and I finally round the corner to go into the bathroom.  And there was Eli.  He was applying my chapstick very carefully to Jack’s . . . rear end.  Eli looked right into my eyes and said “chapped.”  Now if you have a cat, you know that he is right–their little butts do look pretty chapped.

And, frankly, Jack didn’t seem to mind.

And the only question to really ask at that point was whether  it was  the FIRST time Eli had done that to the cat’s behind or the hundredth.

And THAT is my favorite Mother’s Day moment ever because it reminds us that no matter how hard we try to civilize these glorious little creatures, there will always be that day when you realize they’ve been using your chapstick on the cat’s butt.

———————————————————
By my friend  Kurt Lash, who once let me sing back-up…
———————————————————

On a night so dark and dreary
I found myself with eyes so bleary
staring at the TV blankly
while the baby diapered stankily
opened crackered mouth and said to me

Quoth the baby, “Motherdear”

Startled from my dreamy revelries
Gaping at such infant devilry
Having hoped, but now knew sadly
baby’s first would not be “Daddy”
drooling mouth again spoke clear:

Quoth the baby, “Motherdear”

Demon boy! What of the sweat of father’s?
Who, although some say he rarely bothers
to change dark diapers, yet plays the baby videos
and often makes a bath time cameo
and always, somewhere, to his child is near?

Quoth the baby, “Motherdear”

All right then! If it must be so,
I’ll change thee then, and then ye’ll know
that I, like mother, am committed
to see thee changed when thee is wetted
There! Now it’s done! What do I hear?

Quoth the baby, “Motherdear”

“No respect,” I darkly muttered,
from the words that he had uttered,
uttered from his changing table
like words to Scarlet from Clark Gable
in this world, Dad’s in the rear

Quoth the baby, “Motherdear

I have a dear friend who lives too far away, but pops in and out of my life once or twice a year, usually by email.  She just sent me a lovely Billy Collins poem in honor of Mother’s Day.  It’s called “The Lanyard,” and is part of his latest collection, The Trouble with Poetry.  Here’s just part of it:

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
 
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

You can see the text of the whole poem here on NPR   (and listen to an NPR interview with Billy Collins as a bonus!)

Do you have any other Mother’s Day poems to share?  Please leave a comment with a link so we can share it/them together this weekend. 

And speaking of Billy Collins:  here’s an animated video-version of his delightful poem, Forgetfulness (click here)

Even better is this gorgeous, gorgeous video of Billy Collins poem, On Turning Ten (click here)

———–
Related posts:
The Baby: A Mother’s Day Poem 
Happy (snort!) Mother’s Day (A video.  A muffin.  A cat’s butt…)

Many years ago, a very tall man and I went on our first date.  After watching East of Eden in the campus auditorium, we went back to my dorm room, made popcorn, and talked. 

One of the things my new friend mentioned was an article he’d just read in the Atlantic Monthly called “The Size of Thoughts,” by Nicholson Baker.  It begins like this:

Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Once in a while, a thought may come up that seems, in its woolly, ranked composure, roughly the size of one’s hall closet. But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent—this is the size of thought worth thinking about.

Really large thoughts.  That’s what we talked about, and then he went home, and I couldn’t get to sleep that night because something huge had just happened, I could tell. 

Two years later, I married him.

A few years after that, with our children, I had cause to revisit an old friend, the illustrious Dr. Seuss.  Who wrote, of course  “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”

Sometimes, I channel Seuss, like this:

Maybe it matters, though,
Matters a lot.
Whether we don’t, or we do
have a thought.
It might make you rich -
But then it might not.
It might make no difference
or might make a lot.
It might be the kind
that gets in the way,
but it also might lead to
your future, that day.
            * * *

Mr. Baker makes the best point of all about the importance of thoughts, though, so my final words must be his:

Would it be possible to list those features that, taken together, confer upon a thought a lofty magnificence? What makes them so very large? My idle corollary hope is that perhaps a systematic and rigorous codification, on the model of Hammurabi’s or Napoleon’s, might make large thoughts available cheap, and in bulk, to the general public, thereby salvaging the 19th-century dream of a liberal democracy.

——-

Related Posts:
In defense of thoughts (part 1)
To have as many thoughts as possible (part 2)
The size of thoughts (part 3)

You clouds!

Remember to thank the air

For holding you up.

Got any other ideas?  Please DO share!