April 20, 2008

Searching for the Amargosa Vole; &, in print, the Deleted Thirteenth Verse!

On my technorati page, which links to who has linked to this website (it's infrequent), I noticed this blogger had linked to my epic nonsense poem Song of Defecation in a titular post, which I'll repeat here:

I’ve a passion for [endangered] Animals and keep looking for information on [them]. Today, I checked if I could find more info by entering ‘amargosa vole’ in Google and found this:

America has named most of its daughters Emma or Emily, My eldest daughter is riding into St Louis atop a thirty-foot-tall camel. You have sinned against Warren Buffet’s family: To me, you a like a poop from the snakiest animal. Repent! heroes & lovers! Mormons & Scientologists! I am alive, our land is theocracy & sound-bites. My daughter was famous for five minutes for her monster-slaying quests, Now she lives naked on the streets with no bananas & no rights. Lay down, we tire[...]


I tried several more searches on ‘amargosa vole’ but after some time I got lazy, gave up and posted this entry to ‘South America’. Still, I think it was an interesting time.


I thought this was pretty curious, first, because it's easy to find information about the Amargosa Vole (Microtus californicus scirpensis) all over the internet. Secondly, no where in my poem do the words Amargosa or Vole appear. Why would google link him to that site? Thirdly, that blogger appears to be some sort of robot.

Then I remember, an earlier version of that poem had a THIRTEENTH VERSE, lodged somewhere in the middle, deleted almost immediately (for reasons of symmetry, flow, & quality, & superstition, & because "fate's ambassadors" seemed too similar to "hope's canaries".) I'll reprint it here for posterity, & so more robot bloggers interested in endangered species are fooled into reading my poetry. The condor/vole imagery is an adaptation of the eagle/mole passage in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion.



With the weakest binoculars, you can clearly see the condors return,
You have to ask the amargosa vole what treasures are erected beneath.
Big butts cannot lie, you know why the nations of the earth look so forlorn:
A dirge is being forgotten in Africa & elsewhere, fate's ambassador grounded on a sea reef.

No comments: