Many years ago, I published a poem on my blog and then later deleted it because, as pleased as I was with the technique, the content was just a bit crass. Here's how it began:
I'd like to tell you, if I mayA thing that happened just today.My story's clean, I think you'll findUnless you've got a dirty mind.See, while I'm lunching at the Ritz,This woman with enormous eyesWalks right up to my table, sitsBeside me, and eats all my fries.I tell the woman I'm not richAnd think she is a little rudeFor sitting at the table whichI booked and eating all my food.
The unwritten rhymes get progressively more obscene from there, so I'm not going to reproduce the whole thing.
For some reason, this old poem popped into my head this morning while I was on the road. I started mentally reciting it to myself in all its implicitly offensive glory. Then, a few minutes later, I passed a pedestrian who was wearing this T-shirt:
Like my poem, it is literally innocuous, containing obscenity only if it is supplied by the reader's own mind. To the pure, all things are pure.
4 comments:
The fact that the implied obscenity involved the word "Free", and thus giving us another France/ French link, stood out to me.
Further, the meaning of the phrase is completely changed by letters being "blotted out", to use a familiar scriptural phrase. The message ought to be "Free Yourself" but the letters have been covered in black ink, the definition of blotting something, to create a far different message. Instead of Free and France, which has symbolically stood for something directionally toward or like Heaven, you have a phrase that means its opposite... a quick look at Wiktionary, for example, gives "Go to Hell" as the interpretation for telling someone to go F themselves.
Lastly, that message - "F yourself" - is universally understood to be a pretty bad way of swearing at someone spoken by someone who doesn't want to or can't swear, and it came remarkably soon after you posted the Spinal Tap video involving the bread-eating gorillas who can talk, but can't swear ("There is a sort of blockage mechanism..."). Pretty fascinating.
There been enough references of apparent "dislike" directed toward you, seemingly, going all the way back to the pumpkin messages, the dry jack stolen phrase, and Terry telling you very directly, as examples, that a person could be forgiven for thinking this shirt is a continuation of that ongoing message from whoever feels that way ... spoken much more forcefully, in one interpretation. The replay in your mind of that poem with implied but unarticulated obscenities right before seeing the shirt would have prepped you to see the message.
“The unwritten rhymes get progressively more obscene from there, so I'm not going to reproduce the whole thing.”
By abstaining from posting the whole poem, you have not prevented us from knowing its obscenities, as you have already announced its existence, and one is now imagining what the poem is like (and its obscenities are now existent in our imagination).
True, Anselm. How meta of me.
But then again you can only imagine such obscenities as already exist in your mind. Again, to the pure all things are pure.
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