Spam I am

There ought to be a Pulitzer category for this stuff.

If you have a good spam filter, you may not be aware of the "spam filter poetry" phenomenon, which consists of various senders of junk e-mail trying to outdo one another in the writing of nonsensical passages designed to throw off spam filters and thereby deliver their e-mails to your in-box.

I've been keeping examples of these, which often made it to my in-box at work before my company upgraded its filters. They're great fun to read and would actually be somewhat challenging to write, given that they can't include any words or phrases likely to send up a red flag, such as "opportunity," "rich," "sales," "once in a lifetime," etc. A simple line of random letters and symbols won't do, either -- after all, this is poetry! You have to get creative with word combinations that don't often occur. Like "annoying paycheck," for example. As we all learned in high school English, true poetry (well, actually, it's prose) is an art form.

So, for your reading pleasure ...... here are some of my favorite lines of "spam filter poetry":

Most people believe that a sheriff near a buzzard makes a truce with the spider about another grain of sand, but they need to remember how knowingly a dust bunny daydreams. The lover defined by another hole puncher secretly finds subtle faults with a psychotic sheriff. The familiar vacuum cleaner negotiates a prenuptial agreement with the green dust bunny. Indeed, the barely highly paid salad dressing nonchalantly borrows money from the impromptu CEO, while the industrial complex inside an eggplant trades baseball cards with a secretly annoying paycheck.

The shabby pig pen slyly cooks cheese grits for the apartment building over the cocker spaniel. A grain of sand defined by the asteroid trembles, because some spider about a cheese wheel knows a thoroughly resplendent tomato. Sometimes the greasy mortician prays, but a garbage can about another turkey always steals pencils from a globule! Furthermore, a minivan self-flagellates, and the hypnotic cargo bay competes with the tuba player.